Was the Auschwitz Survivor Benedikt Kautsky a Holocaust Denier?

This is suggested in a recent CODOH Revisionist forum thread "Survivors" who deny the Holocaust. 

The claim that the former Auschwitz prisoner Benedikt Kautsky did not know about homicidal gas chambers goes back to the classic Revisionist work "Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands" (Volume 4, published in 1967) by Franz Scheidl and was recycled in 1988 in "Freispruch für Hitler?" by the Austrian right wing extremists Gerd Honsik. Germar Rudolf adopted the claim in his book "Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte" (1993, p. 223), but it was dropped in the revised/rewritten edition (Lectures on the Holocaust, 2010).

So did Kautsky know about gassings or not? 

Here is Franz Scheidl's account in Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands (my translation):

The first edition of the report was published in 1945 in Switzerland. He [Kautsky] wrote about the gas chambers:

"I was [seven years] in the big German concentration camps. In accordance with the truth, I have to say that I never came across a facility such as a gassing facility in any of the camps."

This means that Kautsky has not seen any gassing facilities in any of the camps where he had been. Kautsky was in the concentration camp Auschwitz for more than four years. There cannot be a more perfect and convincing testimony on the non-existance of gassing facilities in Auschwitz. 

It is typical that this book with its weighty testimony was removed from the book stores at one stroke and was bought out by the interested circles. It has to be impossible today to obtain a copy of this first edition. It was also promptly removed from the libraries of the American Information Center, each were holding several copies of the book, and was no longer available from one day to the next. The employees of these American Information Centers only showed embarrassed faces and excuses when confronted with it. It was obvious that the atrocity liars and agitating apostles, for who the testimony was very inconvenient, had to have dominating influence on these libraries and the management of the American Information Center.

As Dr. Kautsky reports in the second edition, the Israeli agitators did not forgive him that he stabbed them in the back regarding their gassing lie and made his life uncomfortable. In this second edition of the book, which was published three years later in 1948, not in Switzerland but in Vienna (Volksbuchhandlung), he was giving in to the pressure and changed the book according to the wishes of the atrocity-lie-propaganda."

 
Back to reality: The first edition of Kautsky's book "Teufel und Verdammte" was published in 1946 in Switzerland (Büchergilde Gutenberg Zürich) and is readily available via interlibrary loan. Kautsky confirmed in the book that he knew about homicidal gassing in Auschwitz from "many reliable sources" (p. 272 - 275). He did not witness homicidal gassings himself, since he was not even detained in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but in Auschwitz-Monowitz, and he did not belong to the Sonderkommando detail dealing with the extermination.

The episode reported by Scheidl is obviously a hoax. In fact, this was apparently even noticed by the Revisionist Wilhelm Stäglich in his book "Auschwitz Mythos" (1979). He wrote that Scheidl's claim is "probably based on an insufficient founded newspaper report" (since another Revisionist author retelling the canard, Heinz Roth, cited a newspaper via the Swedish antisemite Einar Aberg in his book "Was Geschah Nach 1945?"). One has to wonder what Scheidl was smoking when he wrote his text. While Stäglich seems to have bothered to think about how ridiculous and unfounded this was, the same cannot be said for Germar Rudolf. He asserted the story in his "Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte" (p. 223), but not without adding another fictional element himself, that Kautsky was even supposed to have worked in crematorium 2 in Auschwitz-Birkenau.