In Errol Morris' latest film, execution
expert Fred A. Leutcher Jr. hangs
himself and doesn't even know it

DON COHEN

Special to the Jewish. News

Director Errol Morris
outside the gas chambers
at Auschwitz.

a front-page article in the New York Times. Fred, in
1990, received an enormous amount of press talk-
ing about one of my favorite oxymorons: painless
executions.
What's very interesting was that all these articles
made either no or scant reference to his activities as a
Holocaust denier but elaborated at length regarding
his ideas concerning capital punishment as if he were
a real expert.
In the case of [the television program] 20/20,
Jewish groups petitioned ABC not to run this story
without at least mentioning the fact that he was a
Holocaust denier, but they chose not to do that.

JN: Did your approach to making this film change
in any way once you began filming?
EM: The movie changed constantly. When I flashed
Fred Leuchter in front of my cameras, I was learning
about him as he was saying things for the first time.
I believe I'm the first person [outside of legal pro-
ceedings] to talk to the Cornell chemist who per-
formed the test [to see if there was cyanide in materi
als taken from the camp]. Hearing the chemist say
that he thought the entire [Leutcher] report was
meaningless was pretty amazing. No one had heard it.

JN: How do you want viewers to respond to
this film-
EM: I'd like them to [ask questions]. Who is Fred
Leuchter? Why is he saying these things? To call him
an anti-Semite does not provide answers. First of all,
it is not clear that he is an anti-Semite in any tradi-
tional sense. For example, he hasn't been heard saying
rotten things about Jews, yet he's published this truly
rotten manuscript or he allowed it to be published.
I look at Fred in the course of my movie describ-
ing himself as a humanist, a humanitarian, the
Florence Nightingale of Death Row, a champion of
the underdog, seeker of truth, civil libertarian, a guy
who will not compromise his principles no matter
how much he is pressured or encouraged to do so.
He goes on and on — until the very end it's Fred
as Christ figure in his own mind. It's very easy to con-
demn Fred, and I could do the same. It's much harder
to try to understand what is going on in his head.

JN: How do you answer people who think that
deniers should not be given any attention, insisting
that any publicity plays into their hands?

EM: I think that when people say things that are
false, as in the case of the Leuchter Report, and say
things with a net effect of being anti-Semitic, which is
also the case with the Leuchter Report, the thing to
do is not ignore them.
We live in a media fish bowl more than ever, and
we're bombarded by information of all sorts, much of
which is false. A lot of it just enters our thinking
without our even being aware of it. Somehow we hear
things and assimilate what we hear without even
knowing that we're doing it.
What's really important in the case of the Holocaust
denial is not to allow that kind of assimilation to go
unchecked. What you do is make people Conscious of
the fact that others are trying to influence how we
think and you counter it, you answer it, you stand up
and you speak out against it. To do less is irresponsible.

JN: Was your own Judaism or spirituality affected
by making the film?
EM: I grew up in a Jewish family. My mom's first lan-
guage was Yiddish. I was bar mitzvahed, and I went
to a Conservative temple on Long Island. I'm very
proud to be a Jew, and I like being Jewish.
One thing that powerfully affected my Judaism
more than anything else in the course of making the
film was going to Auschwitz and Birkenau. There is
no way a Jew could go to these places.and not be
powerfully affected and depressed.
The Auschwitz archive consists of the architectural
archive that the Nazis forgot to destroy, and the one
thing we know about architecture is that it's premedi-
tated. There's no happenstance about this place. This
was something organized, considered methodically
and laboriously put into place.
There's something about being there and wanting
to be connected. The knowledge that somehow it
does relate to me in some very direct way makes me
think about the importance of being a Jew and wanti-
ng Jews to survive. ❑

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leutcher
Jr. opens next weekend at the Detroit Film
Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Screening times are 7 and 9:30 p.m. Friday and
1, 4, 7 arid 9:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday,
Feb. 25-27. Tickets are $5.50. (313) 833-3237.

f you're bent on denying the
Holocaust, you don't let historic fact
stand in your way. If you're attracted to
such hateful nonsense, you'll pretty
much believe anything.
Though the Klan, skinheads,
Identity Church adherents and
airbrushed neo-Nazis like
David Duke have long been divided by igno-
rance and ego, they all readily accept the idea
that the Holocaust is a myth perpetuated by
Jewish control of the media, government and
academia.
Errol Morris' fascinating, disturbing and
quirky new documentary, Mr. Death: The Rise
and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., centers on an
odd little man who in his ignorance and arro-
gance, provided much of the pseudo-scientific
underpinning of the Holocaust denial move-
ment.
The Leuchter Report, translated into
dozens of languages and readily available on
the Internet, has become a neo-Nazi standard.
They hit pay dirt when they discovered
Leuchter, who truly believes he made a his-
toric discovery that there were no gas cham-
bers at the Nazi death camps Auschwitz-
Birkenau and Majdanek.
The movie introduces Leuchter as a kind of
mad scientist, confident in his ability to fath-
om truths beyond the capacity of others. He
stumbled into the role of the nation's foremost
expert on execution devices because no one
else was doing it
He began to repair and redesign electric
chairs and lethal injection machines in his
home workshop, becoming a sought-after con-
sultant on gallows> and institutional gas cham-
ber.
During lengthy interview segments of the
film, Leuchter addresses the camera directly to
explain how he brought some order to his
neglected field of work. Unusual camera
angles and editing prevent the interviews from
being standard talking heads, and keep the
film moving.
Though lacking any apparent political ide
ology, Leuchter revels in his role as an expert,

`MR. DEATH' BE NOT PROUD on page 77

Don Cohen is director of the
an re lona
office o f the Anti-Dtfamation League.*

JS

2/18
2000

