When turning off Archiving on a feature class, Archiving is also turned off on related tables and feature classes.
In my case I had a table with Archiving turned on and Versioning turned Off. This table only had a few records in the Archive. However, the table had a relationship class with a feature class with an archive of 600k records going back 9 years.
I wanted to turn on Versioning on the table. To do that, I had to turn off Archiving. I didn't preserve the archive because it only had a few records. Apparently this action also turned off Archiving in the related feature class and the history table was deleted.
Idea: don't turn off archiving in related tables and feature class
ps as I understood from Esri Support, this behavior was implemented in ArcGIS Pro. In ArcMap it was possible to turn off archiving in one feature class and not turning it off in the related feature class.