I mean I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers used now are not entirely correct, but if there's unscientific work being done to downplay it, they're in their right to brand it as holocaust denial.
Edit: Note that he doesn't deny the holocaust at all, and his estimate is around 4 million. Which is still quite large. I'm not arguing that he is correct, but it seems absurd to call someone saying 4 million Jews were killed a "denialist".
- Hitler's preeemtive strike against Russia (total Nazi-revesionist BS)
- Russia overstating the numbers in their reports on Auschwitz (which goes into the HD direction, as this is a common first step in getting people to believe HD theories).
If you are going to challenge a global research concesnus in any field, you better have a stringent, logical reason for doing so. If, on the other hand, you are bascially pulling numbers out of nowhere, misquote other out of context, all while writting the other stuff he did, you are on shacky ground.
Edit: I also want to clarify (again) that I'm not arguing that he is correct. I am arguing that he is labeled a denialist for his claim about the number of Jews killed, despite his believing that a large number of Jews were killed in concentration camps.
Also, the holocaust started much earlier than Auschwitz, and it included much more than just exterminatation and concentration camps.
To quote one of the expert witnesses at his trial:
> Irving (...) had deliberately distorted and wilfully mistranslated documents, consciously used discredited testimony and falsified historical statistics. (...) Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all.