The Denial Fossil Faurisson Sounds Like a Broken Record (Again)

After the news that Angela Merkel will receive USHMM's Elie Wiesel award the French denier of the obvious Robert Faurisson couldn't stay silent and had to express his displeasure in an article with the name as long as Pinocchio's nose would be if he were to read any of Faurisson's articles out loud: "Is Angela Merkel Going to Endorse Elie Wiesel’s lies and, Particularly, his lie of the Extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz by Fire and not by Gas?" in which he, predictably, attacks Wiesel as a "false witness":

Elie Wiesel, who died last year, was the “prominent false witness” who said he had been interned during the war at Auschwitz with his father. In January 1945, while the Soviet troops were approaching, the Germans had offered the internees, Jewish or non-Jewish, the choice between leaving for the West (i.e., towards the centre of “Nazi” Germany) and staying on in the camp. With the first choice, the prisoners would experience one of the dreadful “death marches” during which many of them might perish because, particularly, of the devastation caused by the Allied bombings and, with the second, they – especially the women and girls among them – could fear having to face the brutal rabble of the “Red Army”. Having deliberated at length, father and son opted for departure with the Germans, that is, with their supposed exterminators, instead of awaiting their supposed liberators on the spot.

Ding ding ding! Here is our first regurgitated piece of denier wisdom, the "they chose to go with the Nazis!" canard. Is there anything missing from this description? You betcha, as one of Faurisson's intellectual equals might have said. Here's how Wiesel really describes the events in Night:

The camp had become a hive of activity. People were running, calling to one another. In every block, the inmates prepared for the journey ahead. I had forgotten about my lame foot. A doctor came into the room and announced:
"Tomorrow, right after nightfall, the camp will start on its march. Block by block. The sick can remain in the infirmary. They will not be evacuated."
That news made us wonder. Were the SS really going to leave hundreds of prisoners behind in the infirmaries, pending the arrival of their liberators? Were they really going to allow Jews to hear the clock strike twelve? Of course not."All the patients will be finished off on the spot," said the faceless one. "And in one last swoop, thrown into the furnaces.""Surely, the camp will be mined," said another. "Right after the evacuation, it will all blow up."As for me, I was thinking not about death but about not wanting to be separated from my father. We had already suffered so much, endured so much together. This was not the moment to separate.
I ran outside to look for him. The snow was piled high, the blocks' windows veiled in frost. Holding a shoe in my hand, for I could not put it on my right foot, I ran, feeling neither pain nor cold.
"What are we going to do?"
My father didn't answer.
"What are we going to do?"
He was lost in thought. The choice was in our hands. For once. We could decide our fate for ourselves. To stay, both of us, in the infirmary, where, thanks to my doctor, he could enter as either a patient or a medic.
I had made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went.
"Well, Father, what do we do?"
He was silent.
"Let's be evacuated with the others," I said.
He didn't answer. He was looking at my foot.
"You think you'll be able to walk?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Let's hope we won't regret it, Eliezer."
After the war, I learned the fate of those who had remained at the infirmary. They were, quite simply, liberated by the Russians, two days after the evacuation.

Next Faurisson builds sort of a strawman:

E. Wiesel is often portrayed as the witness par excellence to the extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz, capital of “the Holocaust” or “Shoah”.

"Often portrayed", such weasel words. How often? By whom? For example, how many historians of the period - i.e. the people whose opinion actually matters on the topic - have cited Wiesel as such a witness?

In general, care is taken not to specify that, for the author of Night, the extermination was carried out there by FIRE in open-air flames and not by GAS in “gas chambers”.

Pinocchio's nose just got longer since nowhere Wiesel stated that there were no deaths in gas chambers. Describing one alleged killing event does not deny or contradict other killings. Indeed, Wiesel wrote of "the thousands of people who died daily in Auschwitz and Birkenau, in the crematoria" (where the gas chambers were).

(Side note: in fact there are other witnesses describing a truck dumping live children into a fire pit at Birkenau, like Wiesel (incl. Feliks Rosenthal,  Krystyn Olszewski, Jan Szpalerski) and there is a David Olere drawing of a truck full of babies (whether alive or dead) near a flaming pit. To be honest, I'm extremely skeptical about the claims of live babies dumped into flaming pits, even considering the situation of 1944. It is possible that there were some such events with children's corpses dumped into pits which were then embellished into accounts of children being burned alive. Whatever the case may be, logically, had such burnings happened for whatever reason, they did not contradict other methods of killing.)

Inexplicably Faurisson then turns to the Polevoy canard:

The Soviets took Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Curiously Pravda, for six days, stayed silent on the way in which the “German fascists” had gone about exterminating the detainees. Only in its issue of February 2 was it to reveal that the extermination had been carried out by ELECTRICITY; the victims, falling dead on a conveyor belt, were carried to the top of a blast furnace and dumped inside to be reduced to ashes (see Auschwitz: Facts and Legend, January 11, 1995). In other words, any rubbish that the men at Pravda (“truth”) saw fit to write, as so often with holocaustic inventions!

OK, and this is relevant how? Surely Faurisson is aware that the Soviets also had the much more accurate information about how the killings were done, even if in the early stages they, understandably, sometimes had a trouble separating wheat from chaff? E.g. Komsomolskaya pravda correspondent Sergey Krushinsky traveled to Auschwitz with Polevoy and among other descriptions he quoted this one:

A group of prisoners was driven into a chamber. The door was hermetically sealed, gas was introduced. After 8 minutes ventilation of the chamber and cremation of corpses commenced.

Here the gas was used which is known under a name "Zyklon B". This is a product of Prussic acid. Several cans of this poisonous material were left in storerooms, and inmates who worked on the destruction of the plant of death before the camp evacuation [i.e. the members of crematoria Abbruchkommando - SR] remember how the chambers were equipped. Cans of gas were thrown in through an opening in the roof and smashed on the floor. So that the inmates wouldn't be able to go for the smoking material to slow the spreading of the gas, cans didn't fall freely, but inside metal mesh columns.

With some minor inaccuracies (e.g. Zyklon-B was not thrown on the floor, but rather lowered or poured into an inner movable part, so it could have been withdrawn afterwards) this corresponds to what we know to be true.

In other words, what does quoting some unreliable early report prove? Right, nothing. Is, for example, the Katyn massacre a big fake because both Nazi and Soviet initial reports hugely exaggerated the number of the corpses buried in the graves?  Why does Faurisson bring this up at all?

Rather than commemorations and ceremonies I am still waiting for “one proof, one single proof of the existence and functioning of a single Nazi gas chamber”, or a response to the challenge that I repeat persistently: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!” I am answered with physical blows, insults and lawsuits, and even with a special law, known as the “Gayssot law” or “Fabius-Gayssot law” or “Faurisson law”.

Well, Faurisson can start addressing the documentary evidence for the mobile Nazi gas chambers. I won't be holding my breath though. And of course he has been given numerous drawings of functional gas chambers, including those by Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Jan van Pelt. In fact, even his fellow denier Fritz Berg doesn't buy Faurisson's shtick:

On technical subject matter, Robert Faurisson is hopeless! He is a kind of techno-retard locked into his fixed ideas about “impossibilities.” Unfortunately, so are many “revisionist” true-believers who seem to worship at his feet. Denial is their new religion. That may explain why holocaust revisionism is not far more successful than it is.

Now, now, Fritz; now tell us what you really think. :)

Faurisson closes his litany of recycled memes with praise for a neo-Nazi:

As irony would have it, on the same April 24 another German, to whom historical revisionism owes so much, will celebrate his 78th birthday: the admirable Ernst Zündel.

It is very telling whom Faurisson finds admirable and this explains his motive for denying truthful history just fine.