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“The Friendly Executioner.”

[…]

In late February, 1938, [Fred] Leuchter went to Poland, bankrolled by Zündel and accompanied not only by his new bride, Carolyn, but also by a draftsman, a video-camera operator, and a translator. Their itinerary included a four-day inspection tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and, in addition, a day at Majdanek, the former concentration camp near Lublin. (Morris, who followed Leuchter’s journey ten years later, briefly toyed with calling his film “Honeymoon in Auschwitz”) This undertaking was expensive — it cost thirty-seven thousand dollars — but within a few weeks Zündel reaped the yield from his investment[1] in the form of a twenty-page document that eventually acquired near-Biblical stature among devout negationists.

(“I don’t think the German S.S. had a death wish,” Leuchter says in “Mr. Death,” paraphrasing his inductive reasoning.) In Leuchter’s jargon, the assembly line for the crime of the century is referred to only as “the alleged German execution gas chambers.”

“The Leuchter Report” avers of Krema [crematorium] I at Auschwitz, “it would be sheer suicide to attempt to utilize this morgue as an execution gas chamber. The results would be an explosion or leaks gassing the entire camp.” At a number of sites within Birkenau — most notably, the imploded, cavelike interior of Krema II and a building where Zyklon B, which was a trade name for the most convenient source of hydrogen cyanide, had been used to delouse inmates’ clothing — Leuchter did something utterly appalling.[3] Auschwitz-Birkenau is now a museum and every day pilgrims to the crematoria recite memorial prayers and leave behind lighted candles and tiny wooden tablets inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims. This did not deter Leuchter from hacking away wherever he pleased with a hammer and a chisel. The video camera recorded his labors. Sometimes wearing a surgical mask and sometimes not, he gouged a wail here and a ceiling there, sealed the dislodged fragments in plastic bags, and offered a simultaneous narration that sounded like a parody of the old “Mr. Wizard” kids-television program. When it came time to leave the country, he wrapped these souvenirs in his dirty laundry and concealed them in his luggage.

Back home, Leuchter delivered his plunder to a laboratory in Ashland, Massachusetts, and there a chemist named Jim Roth, unaware of the origin of the material,[4] performed an analysis that found a significant level of cyanide in fragments removed from the delousing building but negligible or no traces in the specimens from the crematoria — proof, according to Leuchter’s logic, that the mourners at Auschwitz have come to the wrong place. The most concise explanation to counter Leuchter’s conclusion is that a much higher concentration of Zyklon B is required to kill lice than to kill human beings, and that the delousing building had remained intact while the crematoria, which were dismantled and dynamited by the Germans (or, in one case, by insurrectionist inmates) before the camp was liberated by the Allied forces,[5] had been exposed to the elements for forty — three years before Leuchter came along. Nevertheless, Leuchter did much to reinforce a maxim favored by negationists: “Only lice were gassed in Auschwitz” — a slur that echoed, not coincidentally, Hitler’s characterization of Jews as a plague of vermin.

For a couple of years after the report’s publication, Leuchter himself didn’t seem to be doing badly. His execution-equipment business continued. He rebuilt Tennessee’s electric chair and was retained as a consultant by the State of Florida after a bungled electrocution caused a condemned man’s head to catch fire. And by now he had a legion of grateful admirers, whom he perhaps thought of as friends — members of the Holocaust-denial, mob. Zündel, tantalized by the possibility of a series of sequels to “The Leuchter Reports” sent him in 1989 on a tour of Dachau and other sites in Germany and Austria, during which he was joined by Faurisson and other prominent negationists.

He was embraced by the loathsome British historian David Irving — described by Ron Rosenbaum, in his book “Explaining Hitler,” as the Führer’s “chief postwar defender” — who extolled the “gruesomely expert author” of “The Leuchter Report” and labelled its results “shattering” and “truly astounding.”[6]

Unavoidably, Leuchter became a target of Jewish activists, and it was only a matter of time before prison wardens stopped hiring him. In Massachusetts, he was prosecuted and threatened with jail for practicing engineering without a license.[7] In 1992, he went to Germany, again to testify on Zündel’s behalf (Zündel had been charged with violating Germany’s Holocaust-denial stature after organizing an International Leuchter-Kongress in Munich); while there, he, too, made what the authorities deemed a Holocaust-denial speech. The next year, Leuchter was again lured to Germany, ostensibly to appear on television to talk about electrocution, but he was arrested the day he arrived and charged with “slander of the murdered Jews.” He spent six and a half weeks in prison before he was finally bailed out by Zündel, and a trial was scheduled for 1994, He has never returned to Germany. Also, in 1994 his marriage came unravelled, whereupon he moved to California and, for a long while, as far as Morris was concerned, simply vanished.

[…]

Morris’s schedule called for two full weeks of shooting [at Auschwitz-Birkenau]. He planned to photograph blueprints and other documents in the Auschwitz museum archives — to introduce explicit references to the existence of the gas chambers (and to the inadequacy of Leuchter’s argument).[8] And he would interview a Dutch-born historian, Robert Jan van Pelt, an authority on the camp’s genealogy and evolution into a death factory and the co-author of a book entitled “Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present,” published in 1996.

That first afternoon, van Pelt and I walked along a path parallel to railroad tracks that entered the main gate of Birkenau and terminated half a mite later. On our right was a perimeter of barbed wire, and, beyond that, twenty wooden barracks, which gave way to an endless gridwork of brick chimneys — a ghostscape that remained wherever the barracks had come down. On our left was another border of barbed wire, then brick barracks, and in the distance, the Carpathian Mountains. At last, we reached a crossroads, the spot at which trains dispatched from all over Europe by Adolf Eichmann had been halted and new arrivals were lined up — mothers, children, and the elderly here, able-bodied men and women there. This was where the infamous “selections” had taken place, where the S.S. literally expropriated the divine prerogative: deciding who shall live and who shall die. From this nexus, at the height of the gassings, in 1943 and 1944, the doomed would be consigned to the crematoria and, typically would be dead within a couple of hours.

THE next morning, Morris shot footage inside one of the three remaining delousing buildings, including a disquisition by van Pelt, who posed in front of what he sardonically called “the Wailing Wall of Holocaust deniers” – — the spot from, which Leuchter had chiselled material turned out to possess a relatively high cyanide content; this became the control against which other samples from the “alleged gas chambers” were measured.

[…]

DURING the making of “Mr. Death,” Morris augmented his usual complement of anxieties with a sense of dread at what might happen when he showed Leuchter the completed film.

In addition to van Pelt, Morris had enlisted Jim Roth — the chemist who had analyzed Leuchter’s forensic evidence — as a rebuttal witness. Only after he testified or Zündel’s trial, Roth told Morris, did he realize where the material he analyzed had originated.[11] He acknowledged the limitation of his analysis: cyanide, by its molecular nature, would have bonded with the iron in the brick of the gas chambers only on the surface — ten microns deep, just one-tenth the diameter of a human hair.

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