Themes: Fall From Power, Crimes Against Humanity, Death Row
Main Cast: Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
Release Year: 1999
Country: US
Run Time: 96 minutes
Plot
Throughout his work, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has sought out characters lost in their own eccentric worlds, and he has managed to convey their sense of wonder with their passion, be it a topiary gardener arguing the merits of hand shears in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking discussing the origin of the universe in A Brief History of Time (1992). In his most provocative work since The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris details what happens when this interior dreamscape collides with the hard facts of history. As a young man accompanying his father to work at a state prison, Fred A. Leuchter, a bespectacled mouse of a man, learned how inefficient and inhumane most executions were, and he set out to design and build a better electric chair. Soon he began getting offers from state institutions throughout the country to redesign their electric chairs, along with gas chambers, gallows, and lethal injection machines. He quickly became a renowned expert in capital punishment. When the notorious Nazi sympathizer Ernest Zündel was arrested in Canada, he needed an expert witness to corroborate his assertion that the Holocaust was a hoax; and Leuchter soon found himself chiseling chunks from the gas chamber walls in Auschwitz -- on his honeymoon. His illegal samples showed no significant residue of cyanide, so he concluded that the Holocaust did not happen. He soon became a celebrity of the neo-Nazi set: he testified on behalf of Zündel, gave lectures around the world, and published the Holocaust revisionist tract Leuchter Report. Much to his surprise, his death-machine business began to flounder, his marriage collapsed, and he found himself pursued by Jewish organizations and creditors. This film was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
In an act of cinematic self-destruction to rival that of Senator Joseph McCarthy's more public meltdown in Emile De Antonio's Point of Order, Fred Leuchter, self-professed capital punishment expert, not only allows himself to be used by a nefarious Holocaust denier, he also permits director Errol Morris to capture the entire process on film. Hubris or sheer stupidity? It's hard to tell, because for the first third of the film, as Leuchter calmly discusses various modes of execution, it's possible to see him as no more than a zealous professional. Once he falls in with the notorious neo-Nazi Ernest Zündel, Leuchter's profound devotion to his profession becomes his undoing, though the film never loses its sense of the absurd. The sight of a man spending his honeymoon in Auschwitz taking samples off the walls of the gas chambers to prove that the Jewish inmates were not gassed isn't just tragic; it's laughable. Morris is clearly appalled by Leuchter, but he's also amazingly compassionate about the man's self-delusions. He also knows that a story this good practically tells itself, and he keeps out of the way as much as possible, allowing Leuchter to be his own executioner. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Cast
Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
Ernest Zündel; David Irving; James Roth; Shelly Shapiro; Suzanne Tabasky; Robert Jan Van Pelt
Credit
Errol Morris - Director, Karen Schmeer - Editor, John Sloss - Executive Producer, Caroline Kaplan - Executive Producer, Jonathan Sehring - Executive Producer, Caleb Sampson - Composer (Music Score), Robert Richardson - Camera Operator, Ted Bafaloukos - Production Designer, Robert Richardson - Cinematographer, Peter Donahue - Cinematographer, David Collins - Producer, Dorothy Aufiero - Producer, Michael Williams - Producer
Using film taken at American prisons, Leuchter talked about his upbringing where his father was a Corrections officer. Through his family connections, young Leuchter claimed he was able to witness an execution performed in an electric chair. Leuchter's impressions of the event was that the electric chairs in use in American prisons were unsafe and often ineffective. The event led him to design modifications to the device that were adopted by many American States.
Leuchter claimed he was invited to other American prisons to inspect and design modifications to their electric chairs. Though not possessing any formal training or education in the matter Leuchter claims he was told that the individuals who did possess formal and accepted qualifications would not provide advice due to their opinions on the death penalty, fear of reprisals or that they were squeamish on the subject.
Leuchter's "rise" continued with other State Prisons seeking his advice on their execution facilities that different to electrocution, such as gas chambers and lethal injection. Though initially professing his ignorance of other methods of execution, the authorities seeking his advice reminded him that others with more qualifications refused to help. Leuchter claimed to have self taught himself on these other methods of execution and provided advice that was used by the authorities to improve safety and efficiency.
His "fall" began when Leuchter claimed to have been sought as a witness for the defence of Ernst Zündel on trial in Canada for publishing and sending material denying the Holocaust overseas. Leuchter was asked by the defence to travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz to investigate whether there had been operating gas chambers for executions at the camp.
At his first look Leuchter felt that using poison gas in a building with the internal and external design of the buildings currently on display in the site would have caused the death of everyone in the area outside the buildings as well as inside. The film shows home movie footage taken in Poland of Leuchter taking samples of bricks in the buildings to take back to the United States forensic sciencecrime labs to determine whether there was evidence of poison gas in the material. As per the usual procedure the samples were not identified where they came from. Leuchter claimed the laboratories claimed there was no trace of any poison gas at any time.
As publicity ensued, Leuchter lost his positions as consultants to American prisons.
Background
When Morris originally screened an early version of the film for a Harvard film class, he found that the students reacted by either believing Leuchter's side of the story or by condemning the film as a piece of Holocaust denial. Morris had no such intention, however, as Morris had considered it obvious that Leuchter was wrong, and that the central idea of the film was intended to be the exploration of Leuchter as a being almost completely lacking in self-knowledge:
"The Holocaust has been used in movies as a way of heightening drama in a sense that the triumph of the human spirit never looked so triumphant against the horrors. This movie attempts to do something very different. It's to try to enter the mindset of denial. You are asked to reflect on the whole idea of denial in general, not as some postwar phenomenon but as something that was inherent in the enterprise itself. You would think it would be the easiest thing in the world to identify this behavior as wrong, horrific, depraved. Those people did these things. To me, the question is how. With Mr. Death, it’s about finding out why Fred Leuchter holds these views."[3]
Thus, the "fall" of Leuchter's life is portrayed not as a result of any particular ill feelings toward the Jewish people or passionate support for revisionist history, but rather as an absurd man bumbling his way into saying and believing absurd things. Errol Morris re-edited the film to include additional interviews with people who condemn Leuchter with varying intensity. Morris felt this last step should have been unnecessary, since, to him, Leuchter was so obviously misguided in much of what he says in the film.[3]
In the course of the film Leuchter goes so far as to state frankly that he could not believe in the gas chambers because he could not himself conceive of their mechanics, although he makes it plainly evident that he knows very little of the history in which these arose. He suggests a series of options (hanging, shooting, and explosives), most of which the Nazis had in fact attempted (shootings and explosives) before determining that direct, ongoing, and extensive SS involvement would not be sufficient to the genocidal objectives they set for themselves after earlier forays into mass murder, such as Einsatzgruppen and Babi Yar. Leuchter similarly appears unaware of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and the history or science behind small-scale gassings directed by Hitler's Reich Chancellery and then the SS. In a rather direct sense, the film offers that the Holocaust is fundamentally inconceivable, if not impossible, in Leuchter's mind.
Morris draws out but pursues neither Leuchter's opposition, if not aversion, to gas as a means of execution (Leuchter states his belief that it is an overly hazardous means of execution in terms of other participants) nor his imputed lack of practical experience with it. His general concern with the safety of gassing methods appear to be a stumbling block for his belief in the viability of the gas chambers, the venting process for which he believed would pose a serious threat to their operators. His critics reply:
Nonsense; it is all a question of concentration. Once the gas is released into the atmosphere, its concentration drops and it is no longer dangerous. Also, HCN dissipates quickly. The execution gas chambers in US prisons are also ventilated directly into the atmosphere. Furthermore, if this argument would hold for the extermination chambers, it would hold for the delousing chambers as well, and one would have to conclude that no delousing chambers existed either.[1]
Robert Jan van Pelt, who appears in Mr. Death to specify some of Leuchter's scholarly failures (e.g. not consulting the large documentation archive available at Auschwitz), served as the primary expert witness against David Irving in his libel trial, relating to the court the strength of the physical and documentary evidence supporting the use of that camp for gassing. That testimony was printed as The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (ISBN 0-253-34016-0).Van Pelt is also the co-author, with Deborah Dwork, of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present. (New York: Norton, 1990)
Critical reception
Roger Ebert said the movie was great, strange and provocative, and his co-host Lisa Schwarzbaum called it "amazing."[4] The Detroit News wrote the movie "unmasks the friendly face of evil."[5]
