Robert Faurisson couldn’t have picked a more fitting place to die: Vichy. The “leading” French Holocaust denier, who collapsed and died Monday at age 89, lived in the city in central France notorious for hosting the Nazi-aligned French government of Phillipe Petain from 1940 to 1944.

Faurisson, a onetime lecturer in French literature who grew animated by the pro-colonial cause in Algeria in the early 1960s, gained fame steadily throughout the 1970s with his ever-more florid tracts denying the Holocaust. One of those was a book-length screed decrying Anne Frank’s diary as a hoax. Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, meanwhile, did the world no favors when it gave space in its pages to Faurisson in 1978 and 1979 to argue that there were no Nazi-operated gas chambers. He argued that they were a fiction cooked up by Zionists to justify the existence of Israel. “There was never never a single execution gas chamber under the Germans. … So all those millions of tourists who visit Auschwitz are seeing a lie, a falsification,” he later claimed.