Fred Arthur Leuchter Jr. (born February 7, 1943) is an American manufacturer of execution equipment and Holocaust denier, best known as the author of the Leuchter report, a pseudoscientific document*"Leuchter and Rudolf have published pseudoscientific reports purporting to show that chemical residues present in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau are incompatible with homicidal gassings." Green, Richard J. "Leuchter, Rudolf, and the Iron Blues". Retrieved on September 11, 2008. "The Leuchter Report, a pseudo-scientific document which allegedly proves that Zyklon B was not used to exterminate human beings, was translated into Arabic and sold at the International Book Fair in Cairo in January 2001." Roth, Stephen. Stephen Roth Institute. Antisemitism Worldwide, 2000/1, University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 228. "The turning point came in 1989, when Irving launched Fred Leuchter's pseudo-scientific Leuchter Report, which made the spurious claim that the absence of cyanide residues in the walls of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps proved that they could not have functioned as mass extermination centres." Brinks, Jan Herman. Timms, Edward. Rock, Stella. Nationalist Myths and Modern Media, I.B. Tauris, 2006, p. 72. "The Leuchter report, was, indeed, an amateurish report produced by a man with no expertise, either historical or forensic." Hirsh, David. Law Against Genocide. Routledge Cavendish, 2003, p. 134. "Another common tactic of the deniers is to engage in historical inquiries that on the surface appear legitimate but upon close examination prove to be based on pseudo-science. One prominent example was the investigation of the Auschwitz gas chambers by Fred Leuchter [...]. Detailed study of the "Leuchter Report" revealed that it was based on erroneous assumptions (cyanide does not penetrate deeply into concrete). It also emerged that Leuchter had falsified his credentials and overstated his expertise. Despite this, his report is still cited by deniers." Cull, Nicholas John. Culbert, David Holbrook. Welch, David. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present, ABC-CLIO, 2003, p. 168. "...the institute relied primary on the talents of a California-based publicist named Bradley Smith who packaged and promoted Leuchter's discredited material as if it were the very essence of "scientific research" or at least a tenable "point of view," intrinsically worthy of inclusion in the academic agenda..." Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. City Lights Books, 1997, p. 24. "After the trial, both Irving and Zündel published the results of Leuchter's trial research as The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, despite the fact that the court rejected both the report and Leuchter's testimony. [...] The discredited report is popular in the Holocaust denial movement, and one edition features a foreword by Irving." Gerstenfeld, Phyllis B. Grant, Diana R. Crimes of Hate: Selected Readings, SAGE Publications, 2003, p. 201. "Leuchter's report contained a considerable amount of scientific, or, as it turned out, pseudo-scientific analysis of chemical residues on the gas chamber walls, and similar matters. It was quickly discredited, not least on the basis of Leuchter's failure adequately to defend his findings on the witness stand." Evans, Richard J. David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial: Electronic Edition, Section 3.3c, The 1991 Edition of Hitler's War , Paragraph 13. Retrieved on 2008-09-12. alleging there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Prior to the document's publication, he was contracted by authorities of several U.S. states to improve the designs of instruments for capital punishment. He was charged in Massachusetts with misrepresenting himself to penitentiaries as an engineer, despite having no relevant qualifications. He plea bargained with state prosecutors and received two years' probation. He has also been accused of running a "death row shakedown", where he threatened to testify for the defense in capital cases if he was not given contracts for his services by that state.
Leuchter became internationally known for his testimony in defense of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel in 1988. His study for Zündel's trial has been referred to as the Leuchter reportLeuchter, Fred A. (1998) The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth Samisdat Publishers since it was published by Zündel with that title.
Leuchter's work is often presented by Holocaust deniers as scientifically based evidence for Holocaust denial, even though his research methods and findings have been widely discredited on both scientific and historical grounds. Leuchter and his report are the subject of Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a 1999 feature-length documentary film by Errol Morris.
Education and pre-report career Leuchter was born on February 7, 1943, to Fred Arthur Leuchter Sr. in Malden, Massachusetts.
He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Boston University in 1964. He holds patents for a geodetic instrument and an electronic sextant.US Patents 3,968,570 and 4,339,198
Fred Leuchter Associates Leuchter started Fred Leuchter Associates in 1979, with which he sold services to several states to help them maintain, improve, document, and ascertain the effectiveness of their equipment for administration of capital punishment. Trombley, Stephen (1992) The Execution Protocol: Inside America's Capital Punishment Industry() His initial work was with electric chairs, starting in Tennessee. His broader claims are that his work in this area is humanitarian, providing greater respect for both guards and those to be executed. He also claims that he offered his services at considerable economy: off-the-shelf parts, labor, and a 20% profit. By his own account, consultation among various state government agencies spread his reputation from Tennessee to other states, and further assignments followed. Leuchter "aggressively solicited business", and in 1985 the state of New Jersey purchased his proposal for a lethal injection system for $30,000.
Zündel trial and investigation at Auschwitz In 1988 Leuchter was hired by Ernst Zündel, who was being tried in Canada for publishing works of Holocaust denial, to investigate and testify as an expert witness at his trial, for a fee of $30,000."... is said to have paid $30000 for Leuchter's report and his testimony." Leuchter was recommended to Zündel by Bill Armontrout, warden for Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri. In his capacity as warden, Armontrout was personally responsible for carrying out executions by the use of cyanide gas. Leuchter traveled to Auschwitz and Birkenau to examine the structures identified by former guards, former prisoners, and investigators as gas chambers, and concluded that they could not have been used for mass murder.
Zündel's Samisdat Publications published his findings as The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek Poland (published in England as Auschwitz: The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report – The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz), which the court accepted only as evidentiary display and not as direct evidence. Leuchter was therefore required to explain it and to testify to the validity of his conclusions under oath during the trial. His report was republished and translated by various denial organizations, and he has since lectured on it and his subsequent experiences. Protests were organized in response to his lectures.
In 1988, prior to writing the report, Leuchter had traveled to several sites of structures identified as gas chambers, where, without permission, he collected samples from walls, ceilings and floors, using a chisel and hammer to chip and scrape off pieces of the masonry. He took copious notes about the floor plans and layout, and all of his actions were videotaped by a cameraman. (Leuchter, who had married only about one month before the trip, told his wife that the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau was their honeymoon.) Leuchter then brought the samples back to Boston, where he presented them to Alpha Analytical Laboratories, a chemical laboratory, for testing. Leuchter told Alpha only that he would use the samples as evidence in a court case about an industrial accident. The lab tested them for exposure to cyanide and found trace amounts in the crematoria, which Leuchter dismissed in his report:
Leuchter compared the low amounts in the Krema to the higher readings in his positive control sample.
Lab manager James Roth testified under oath to the results at the trial. It was only after he left the stand that Roth learned what the trial was about. In an interview for Morris's film, Roth states that cyanide would have formed an extremely fine layer on the walls, to the depth of one-tenth of a human hair. Leuchter had taken samples of indeterminate thickness (he is seen in Morris's film hammering at the bricks with a rock hammer). Not informed of this, Roth had pulverized the entire samples, thus severely diluting the cyanide-containing layer of each sample with an indeterminate amount of brick, varying for each sample. Roth offers the analogy that the tests were like "analyzing paint on a wall by analyzing the timber that's behind it."
Leuchter did not examine the walls of the gas chambers until 50 years after they had been used; his critics note that it would have been virtually impossible to discover any cyanide at all using his method. In fact, tests conducted on ventilation grates immediately after the end of the war showed substantial amounts of cyanide. The chambers were demolished by the Nazis when they abandoned Auschwitz, and the facilities Leuchter examined were, in fact, partially reconstructed. Leuchter was unaware that parts of the camp and chambers had been reconstructed, so he had no way of knowing if the bricks he was scraping had actually been used in the original gas chamber.
Leuchter claimed that the relatively low concentration of cyanide residue measured in his samples of the remains of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, compared to his samples of the "delousing chambers" in which clothes were deloused using the same gas, hydrogen cyanide, excluded the possibility of them being used to kill humans. His report assumed that lower concentrations are required for delousing than to kill humans and other warm-blooded creatures; in fact, with their simpler structures and slower metabolisms, insects are more resistant to such gross metabolic poisons than mammals. Both toxicological study and practical experience demonstrate that it takes a much higher concentration of cyanide (16,000 parts per million) to kill insects than to kill humans (300 ppm), as well as an exposure time of many hours rather than only minutes. ["Zyklon B"], The Nizkor Project, undated. Leuchter also failed to explain his belief that Zyklon B was used only for delousing, in view of his belief that the product would present technical difficulties in ventilating and decontaminating such as to make it impractical for use in a gas chamber. Nor did he explain why such large chambers would be needed for delousing clothes.
Leuchter also wrongly assumed that it would take 20 to 30 hours to air a room disinfected with Zyklon B. Since far lower concentrations are required when gassing people than for delousing, it would take only 20 to 30 minutes to ventilate the room; therefore, the forced-ventilation systems used would be more than adequate to allow the gas chambers to be operated without endangering the executioners.