# Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    MR. DEATH

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Lions Gate Films/Independent Film Channel Director: Errol Morris Cast: Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., Ernst Zundel, David Irving, James Roth, Shelly Shapiro, Suzanne Tabasky, Robert Jan van Pelt

Hitler promulgated the Big Lie technique in his rambling autobiography, "Mein Kampf." Tell a flagrant lie often enough--making sure it's a whopper (because people would not believe a small fib)--and people will accept it. One of the biggest lies of the 20th century is that the Holocaust never happened. Despite mountains of evidence--documentation, testimony of thousands of survivors, interviews with people on all sides of World War 2 including talks with the population of the areas surrounding the smoke-filled crematoria--a relatively small but influential cabal of revisionists insists that the Holocaust is a myth. Never mind that six million Jews disappeared from the face of the earth. Take a fact that people today would rather not admit, simply deny it, and poof: you have a coterie of followers. These adherents are not just neo-Nazis: Holocaust deniers include bubbleheads and naifs as well. An engineer from Malden, Massachusetts, one Fred A. Leuchter, could not be called a bubblehead, but this mousy guy who before 1988 had never traveled abroad-- ostensibly eager for attention, celebrity status, and gullible to boot--became one of America's leading spokesmen for the Big Lie. Though insisting to this day that he is in no way anti-Semitic (very likely true), he was determined to prove that the structures built by the Nazis in Poland to eliminate Jews and "undesirables" simply were not gas chambers. What, then happened to the millions who perished in the camps? Leuchter does not go into this. His aim was simply to prove via forensic evidence that the stones that formed the basis of the chambers were never touched by poisonous gases.

If Leuchter did nothing but get his infamous report published in a dozen or so languages, he would be an interesting enough subject for a documentary. But Leuchter is in other ways quite an unusual fellow, one whose contributions require an ace documentarian to elicit. Simply getting the man to talk freely and articulately for the cameras- -as could interviewers like Fred Wiseman and Claude Lanzmann--would itself be daunting. But Errol Morris, who filmed this fascinating journey of discovery, was the man for the job. To his credit, Morris has given us such films as "The Thin Blue Line," a 1988 blockbuster which proved that a hitchhiker did not kill a Dallas policeman in 1976--and that the lowlife who fingered him (and who wound up on Death Row for a subsequent murder) did. That remarkable documentary, which employed a score by Philip Glass, led to the reopening of the case. The defendant was cleared. Morris's most complex documentary, however, "A Brief History of Time," dealt with the work of physicist Stephen Hawking, while his least accessible film, "Fast Cheap & Out of Control" looks at the lives of four totally different men and tries to meld the quartet (unsuccessfully, I thought), into an examination of the nature of existence itself.

Why, then, did Morris choose Leuchter as his subject this year? Leuchter would have been the ideal subject for the long defunct TV series, "What's My Line." Arlene Francis herself would not have guessed his profession. As an engineer interested in making executions more humane and dignified for both the executees (as he calls them) and for their guards, he was called in as a consultant by several states to look over their death machines and to suggest changes. We see him in the modern, antiseptic Tennessee death house, where he explains the methodology of the electric chair and discusses the changes he proposed to make a shocking death more merciful. We learn that the executioner delivers two shocks: one a brief jolt that cooks the guy's nervous system and renders him all but dead. The second jolt, lasting a minute of so, finishes him off. The trouble with some of these executions, Leuchter reminds us, is that in some cases excessive electricity cooks the killer so that his eyeballs fly across the room and, as in one Florida case, his head could catch fire. Leuchter's skill in designing better straps and helmets for the Tennessee hot seat gave him an immediate contract in another state to re-build its gas chamber. Leuchter's career was on a roll. Until...

...until a neo-Nazi, Ernst Zundel, published a tract in Canada "Did 6 Million Really Die?" which argued that the Holocaust was nothing but hate propaganda. Put on trial for violating Canada's law forbidding Holocaust denial (a form of hate), Zundel convinced Leuchter to go to Auschwitz to attempt to prove that the gas chambers simply did not exist. When Leuchter visited the buildings in the infamous Polish town--taking his new wife Carolyn with him as their "honeymoon" as well as a cinematographer and translator--he secretly and illegally scraped samples of the stone walls to take home with him. Delivering the pulverized samples to a Massachusetts lab, he received a report that there was no trace of cyanide in the specimens. Assuring his public both in his writings and in a flurry of conferences before largely sympathetic groups that traces of cyanide would have remained on the stones forever, he failed to report that by breaking his specimens into parts no more than 1/10,000 of the original stones, he watered down the segments to such an extent that no gas could possibly be present.

Thinking that his finding would enhance his career, he was dismayed when he lost all his contracts with the death houses and when even his wife left him for good.

Documentaries usually aim for variety by presenting a large number of talking heads, the documentarian interviewing each and switching back and forth to give the viewer the impression of diversity. In this case--while some interviews are held with Jewish groups, with a scientist in the Massachusetts lab, with the neo-Nazi who interested Leuchter in the journey to Poland--Morris concentrates almost exclusively on Leuchter himself. This guy, deluded as he is, "wearing blinders" as others described him, and easily influenced by heinous anti-Semites, is strangely difficult to dislike. Though somewhat mousy behind his thick glasses and small stature, Leuchter--who admits to drinking 40 cups of coffee going through six packs of cigarettes a day--is difficult to detest. He is articulate through his pronounced New England accent but never resorts to throat-clearers like "you know," "like," "uh," and other disturbing mannerisms that could make the typical audience for a documentary bolt for the doors. He seems to prove something we liberal arts students back in college always said about the engineering students: that while they actually build things, we could think. Leuchter, for all his training, comes across lacking in Education with a capital E. In a sense he is like the Nazis themselves--highly efficient in what they did but absolutely, disastrously psychotically wrongheaded in their mission. Just as Hitler destroyed his own country while trying to bring it to his perverted idea of greatness, so Leuchter destroyed his career and even his social life. Now bereft of jobs, family and friends, he seems to have difficulty even selling the lethal injection machine he designed and half completed when the state canceled his contract and threw the gadget at him to keep. This powerful and perversely humorous film, however, has the opposite consequence for Errol Morris, who comes out as one of the country's premier documentarians with yet another compelling film on his resume.

Not Rated. Running Time: 91 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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