During his visit to the Auschwitz archives, Pressac learned of a French professor who had made a very brief visit to the archives in 1976 but after two days took ill and left. Shortly thereafter this professor published a series of articles asserting that hydrocyanic-acid homicidal gas chambers were an impossibility and that therefore the annihilation of the Jews at such places as Auschwitz was only a legend, the result of historical fakery if not purposeful deceit.{86} On his return to France, Pressac sought out Robert Faurisson. Impressed by Faurisson’s seemingly vast array of knowledge and “serious and unimpeachable references,” Pressac began to meet with him on a regular basis.{87} The meetings lasted for approximately nine months, during which time, Faurisson, anxious to co-opt the pharmacist into the ranks of Holocaust deniers, opened his files to him.{88} Initially Pressac found himself greatly attracted to Faurisson’s arguments. After a number of months of intensive contact, the meetings because less frequent. Pressac broke off all contact in April 1981, when he discovered that for Faurisson “dogma [was] paramount” to truth. Pressacs own reading of the documents convinced him that Faurisson’s arguments were fatally flawed.
After Pressac broke with Faurisson he recognized that it was not Faurisson’s theories that attracted him but the professor’s seeming ability to explain away something that was inherently unbelievable. This is the deniers’ ultimate trump card. They have the only rational explanation for something that remains, despite massive research, essentially irrationaclass="underline" It could not happen. When Pressac subjected deniers’ theories to documentary analysis he understood that they were not just scientifically flawed. They ignored reams of evidence that proved precisely what Faurisson and his cohorts wished to deny.
Pressacs doubts about Faurisson’s methodology first surfaced when together they reviewed weekly reports on the prisoners killed at the concentration camp near Strasbourg, Natzweiler-Struthof. In August 1943 a gas chamber was put into operation there in order to provide August Hirt, a professor at the Strasbourg University Institute of Anatomy, with skeletons for his collection. Another professor, Otto Bickenbach, availed himself of the gas chambers to conduct medical experiments on prisoners. Approximately 130 people, primarily Jews and Gypsies, were killed in it. When Pressac and Faurisson reviewed the documents from the camps, Pressac saw the “honest and meticulous professor in a more worrying light.”{89} The camp administrators had prepared weekly reports on the number of prisoners in the camp. Two reports from August 1943, the month the gas chamber started operating, contained important evidence. The report of August 14 indicated that there had been 90 Jews present at the outset of the week of whom 30 had “left” the camp deceased. The report for the next week indicated that of the 60 remaining at the beginning of that week, 57 had died. This extremely high death rate, two weeks in a row at precisely the time the gas chamber commenced working, aroused Pressac’s suspicions. He soon discovered additional evidence. On all the other reports some cause of death was entered on the reverse side. In these two cases the reports were left blank. All other deaths were recorded in the Natzweiler town hall. In the case of these deaths no record was kept.{90} Pressac considered the two reports “damming evidence” that these Jews had been killed en masse. However, Faurisson had a ready “explanation.” The forms used for the week of the fourteenth and twenty-first of August differed slightly from previous ones. (They were printed in Gothic script while previous ones had been printed in Roman script.) Faurisson explained to his doubting disciple that the change in script confused the SS. Instead of listing the Jews on the line for “liberation,” the SS mistakenly listed them on the line for “deaths.” And somehow the SS made precisely the same mistake two weeks in a row. This convenient explanation, which ignored an array of contradictory evidence, constituted a “warning bell” for Pressac. Faurisson’s explanations no longer seemed as precise and logical as they had; they certainly bore little relationship to the evidence.
(It is ironic that Pressac’s doubts should have been aroused by Faurisson’s treatment of the Natzweiler reports. Apparently at the time Pressac did not know that the Waffen-SS unit that supervised the building of the gas chamber left behind a document that explicitly described the facility’s purpose. They submitted a bill to Strasbourg University’s Institute of Anatomy for the “construction of a gas chamber.”{91})
Faurisson’s description of his meeting with Auschwitz museum officials sounded yet another alarm for Pressac:
I made one of the Auschwitz Museum officials, Mr. Jan Machlek, come to the place (Crematorium I). I showed him the furnaces. I asked him “Are they authentic?” He replied “Of course!” I then passed my finger across the mouth of one of the furnaces. I showed him there was no soot. With an embarrassed air, he told me that these furnaces were a “reconstitution.”{92}
Faurisson made it appear as if he had caught this official in a lie and forced him to tell the truth.[6] But it was Faurisson, not the museum representative, who engaged in obfuscation. Faurisson’s contention that, if the furnaces were authentic, soot should have been present, more than thirty-five years after they had been used made as much sense as his claim that the SS officers could decipher a form printed in Gothic script. Equally manipulative was his claim that it was his revelation that there was no soot present that forced the “embarrassed” official reluctantly to admit that the facility was a “reconstruction.” Why should the official have been embarrassed? The museum’s own photographs demonstrate that the structure was rebuilt after the war.{93}
This kind of tactic is typical of deniers, Faurisson in particular. In 1987 he appeared on a radio interview show in France. Another guest on the show was a Holocaust survivor who—the host told Faurisson prior to the show—had been interned in Auschwitz from April 11, 1943, until April 11, 1945. Faurisson immediately told the host that this was impossible because most prisoners at Auschwitz were evacuated in January 1945. According to Faurisson, when the host reported these objections to the survivor, “the latter, not without some embarrassment, then had to confess that he had been transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in the last months of the war.”{94} Relying on what has become a mainstay of deniers’ reasoning, Faurisson contended that if one item was false much if not all else was false. The survivor, Faurisson wrote to the host of the show, “lied to you on this point. I fear he lied to you and to the listeners on many other points.”{95}
Once again, as in the case of the Auschwitz museum official, one wonders why the man should have been embarrassed. It is common knowledge that Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945 and that the Soviet Army entered the camp shortly thereafter. (By April they had reached Berlin.) Why would this former prisoner have lied about something so widely known? His “lie” did not make his experience sound more severe. If anything, his “admission” that he was evacuated in the final months of the war intensified his saga of suffering. This was a time when the Nazis marched survivors of the death camps west to Germany to keep them from falling into the liberators’ hands. Thousands died as a result. The host may have assumed that when the survivor said he was interned for two years, the entire time was spent in Auschwitz. Faurisson transformed what in all likelihood was a misunderstanding into a deliberate lie that was part of a nexus of conspiratorial falsehoods.