posted
If you have heard of him, most likely it’s because of testimony he gave in a Canadian court. Testimony in which he declared that the holocaust did not exist, or at least that the gas chambers at Auschwitz could not be gas chambers. This trail was on a seldom used Canadian law brought up to put a neo Nazi (one Ernst Zundel) in prison for publishing “what he knew to be false and damaging information”; which was of course that the Holocaust had not occurred.
Zundel’s defense was that he was right! There was no Holocaust and in fact it was just a really big myth put forward to vilify the Germans. Zundel is a hard core Nazi enthusiasts, one of those people you always can’t imagine really exist, they’re just so vile.
Fred Leuchter is not a member of a neo Nazi group, nor is he associated with any anti-Semantic group. His father was a prison warden, and would often bring him to work with him. There little Fred explored the prison, all parts of it including its execution room (an electric chair). Like almost all prison electric chairs it was malfunctioning and causing very painful executions, certainly against the state and national code, not to mention a violation of Cruel and Unusual punishment. At the time the prison decided to upgrade and fix their chair, Fred Leuchter was an engineer, and so his father asked him to work on it. He not only fixed the electric chair but came up with his own design for electric chairs that was both cheaper than the current ones used and perfectly up to code so it would provide an almost painless death.
There are very few people who know anything about execution equipment, it is not a wide market, and most people would rather stay clear of it because of moral objections or just plain un-ease on the whole thing. So when one prison decided to fix its lethal injection chamber, Leuchter was called in. He did research on it and came up with a rather ingenious solution, which was accepted mostly because of the success of his previous electric chairs. From there he also went on to make gas chambers. In other words, Leuchter became an expert and manufacture of execution equipment.
He had started his own business and was doing quite well. He provided cheap and very high quality systems to prisons, and was certainly one of very few people in his field. He was (obviously) a death penalty proponent, but was also very concerned with the manner in which people were executed. “We have to remember, those people are people too”. He even insisted on beautifying the lethal injection chamber and designed a very comfortable chair for it instead of a hard table that was more common. This was not a cold blooded killer, he was concerned with the rights of the prisoners.
When Zundel’s trial came he knew he needed an expert to investigate the Holocaust, to show that it had not happened. The most obvious choice to him was Leuchter, an execution specialist who had designed gas chambers. So he commissioned him, his drafter and a camera man to go to Poland and investigate. This is when Leuchter’s life virtually ended.
One thing to remember is that Leuchter was an engineer, and not even a certified one, just someone who knew how to make execution equipment. He knew nothing of scientific research or historical evidence. He walked into this project with no knowledge of how to conduct a true investigation. So he did two things that made sense to him. He examined the structures at Auschwitz to see if he felt they could act as gas chambers and he took numerous samples of the buildings there to check for the gas that was supposed to be used.
As I said, Leuchter knew nothing of how to conduct research, he was naïve and just plain unknowledgeable when it came to this. He did not check the archives to see that the reason there was no way for the gas to escape was that the pipes had been destroyed, nor that the method for dispersing gas had been carefully written up. All he knew was that he saw none of these things.
The samples he took were analyzed, and not surprisingly found no evidence of the gas. Once again Leuchter’s ignorance of such matters convinced him of a false hood. The gas would’ve penetrated perhaps 10 micrometers, about 1/10 the width of a human hair. What he had analyzed was samples as large as his thumb and larger. The lab doing the testing simply broke up the whole thing and analyzed the entire contents. This act diluted whatever gas was in there by maybe 10,000 to 100,000 times.
So when Leuchter testified he said definitively something he thought to be true, he was not speaking out of guile or hate but simply what he felt he had proved. He was obviously wrong but he went in with the intention of simply discovering truth. Zundel ended up being pronounced guilty anyways, but that was not the point of the trial.
Leuchter returned to his home in the Untied States after what was only a few weeks to discover that the orders for equipment had dried up. No one was interested in buying anything he made. A short time later he was arrested for practicing engineering with out a license (at the time, approximately 9/10 engineers did not have an engineering license for that state). His wife left him and not a single order came in.
Many people vilified him, he was a passionate Jew hater, he was pure evil. They hated him, they were sure he was the devil, almost literally. They missed the point, Leuchter is not a Jew hater, he did not try to hurt anyone, he did not lie, he was just ignorant, he was just naïve. When he described why he did not believe the holocaust happened he kept using the phrase “it just doesn’t make any sense”. Like many people he seemed just incapable of believing that such an atrocious thing would happen. For this he lost all that he had gained in life.
I’m not sure why I felt the need to tell this story, certainly I believe the holocaust happened, and that it was one of the worst things to ever happen on this planet. And certainly I believe that people need to remember that it did happen to forget is to deny and to deny is to ask for it to happen again. I don’t think Fred Leuchter should so much be admired, he was wrong because of his ignorance. Perhaps I just feel sorry for him. Ignorance is far too common to be a crime, and really that is all the it took for Leuchter to be hated by thousands, for his wife to leave him, for his business to collapse. Perhaps he’s a warning, beware your ignorance, you never know what hole you’ll fall into if you let it lead you.
posted
Thanks Hobbes, that was quite interesting, I hadn't heard about that. Hmmm, he's either deranged or lying, but it's still interesting.
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posted
Wow. Poor guy. It's a shame what bad luck and ignorance can do to people. If only he was willing to do research that was a little more personal and intensive. (sighs) Thanks for telling us about this, Hobbes! Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I don't know whether he "deserved" the fate he ended up with. I do think you're cutting him too much slack. Certified or no, he must have studied the scientific method. Even HS students know, on of the first steps when looking at a new problem is RESEARCH.
He didn't bother. Perhaps he was too accustomed to depending on his own work? Sounds like what the Greeks called hubris -- and you know what happened to people who demonstrated THAT!
Furthermore, he lied under oath -- about his credentials, about his job experience, ABOUT WHAT HE FOUND -- he testified about the existence and use of buildings that he later confessed has collapsed long before he examined the area.
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posted
The other thing I think about is that he had to have known to what use his work was being put. It's interesting to me that anyone would try to pretend that six million people weren't murdered by the Nazis who were. It's not like those people didn't have families. All the many people living in the U.S. whose entire families in Europe were murdered, what are the holocaust-didn't-exist people claiming happened to all those people? I mean, it's not like there isn't abundant evidence, overwhelmingly abundant. For instance, what do they say of the photos of the naked stick people who were liberated from the camps at the end of the war? Or what do they say about all the Allied soldiers who can testify to the conditions they found in the camps, and the bodies, the bones, etc.?
There can be no good reason for perpetuating this lie. I can't believe that the man was totally ignorant of the use to which his efforts were being put, or that he was incapable of looking at all of the abundant evidence there is that shows the holocaust was all too real.
I don't think I'd want to do business with someone who was trying to put that one over on anyone. I think people are justified in taking their business elsewhere.
[ December 29, 2003, 03:27 AM: Message edited by: ak ]
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quote:He didn't bother. Perhaps he was too accustomed to depending on his own work? Sounds like what the Greeks called hubris -- and you know what happened to people who demonstrated THAT!
I completely agree, he didn't know and he didn't know he didn't know. To me this is ignorance, though I defenitly see Hubris entering into it.
quote:Furthermore, he lied under oath -- about his credentials, about his job experience, ABOUT WHAT HE FOUND -- he testified about the existence and use of buildings that he later confessed has collapsed long before he examined the area.
Well that's a bist misleading. He lied about his credentials, but mostly just that he said he was an engineer when he wasn't certified, the problem was that they were altogether the wrong credentials to be reasearching it, not if he had gotten the diploma. And he has always said the buildings had collapsed, it was just his opinion that before they had collapsed they couldn't have been used as gas chambers.
quote:I mean, it's not like there isn't abundant evidence, overwhelmingly abundant. For instance, what do they say of the photos of the naked stick people who were liberated from the camps at the end of the war? Or what do they say about all the Allied soldiers who can testify to the conditions they found in the camps, and the bodies, the bones, etc.?
I don't know why he didn't see it, the way it seems to me is he went into this prokect with almost no thought. He came up with a quick way of testing if there had been a holocaust and as soon as his (deficient way) had shown him there wasn't, he stopped looking.
quote:I don't think I'd want to do business with someone who was trying to put that one over on anyone. I think people are justified in taking their business elsewhere.
Well they're certainly aloud to, I don't think anyone should be forced to do buisness with him. But I think they key here is that he doesn't think he's lying. he's convinced he's telling the truth because the only evidence he looked at gave him that answer. As I said, ignorance certainly, and I agree, plenty of Hubris but I really don't think there wasn anything malcioius about it, just foolishness.
posted
He lied about having worked for states and jurisdictions which DENIED his ever having worked for them. He gave names of wardens at the prisons in question -- and got them WRONG. Not terribly surprising since he hadn't actually done any work (or been contracted to do so) for them.
His testimony at the trial -- before many details of his lies which we now know were even challenged -- was THROWN OUT as "preposterous" by the judge.
He was not nearly as innocent as you are painting him.
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I had not heard of his lying about where he worked. This is intersting.
quote:His testimony at the trial -- before many details of his lies which we now know were even challenged -- was THROWN OUT as "preposterous" by the judge.
That's because they were preposterous. I don't think he was really innocent, if you are reasearching something as huge and important as this it's ridiculous to take just a couple of weeks and declare it to have never happened. He should've researched and investigated, he should've looked for the very detailed records the Germans kept but he didn't. He's very guilty of beeing ignorant, certainly guilty of having too much pride, and guilty of just plain guilty of being unable to see beyond the small amount of evidence he collected. I just don't think he is guilty of hatered.
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What I see as the tragedy for Leuchter is that he had no interest in this before hand. He was doing well for himself, married and with a good buisness. And while certainly many oppose the death penalty he was trying to civilize it, make it as humane as the death penalty can be. The tragedy is the one more life Nazism reached out and destroyed, so many years after it fell.
posted
There are many things for which the Nazis can be blamed.
Leuchter having to deal with the real-world consequences of his actions is not one of them, IMO.
It is worth noting that he still stands by his claims, even though many scientists have disproven both his methods and his assumptions.
He still works with various "revisionist" groups, has never published a corrected version of his report (with accurate credentials), still insists that no one was gassed at Auschwitz.
His report is full of not merely ignorance but logical fallacies and numbers invented out of whole cloth. He MADE STUFF UP. Quite a lot of stuff.
He is not a wronged innocent, and I have to say, it really disturbs me to see him portrayed as one.
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posted
I think you're missing my point Rivka, what I'm saying he's innocent of is being a hatefilled Anti-Semite out to "do in the Jews". I guess I'm just not clear on what you think I'm declaring him innocent off when you say this:
quote:He is not a wronged innocent, and I have to say, it really disturbs me to see him portrayed as one.
posted
Yeah, I just really have to questions the motives, based only on what you said here, and not even given Rivka's extra information. This isn't a vacuum that this false evidence is being introduced into. It's buttressing the claims of people who are promulgating hate. It behooves a person to take extra pains to get things exactly right in that circumstance. At the very least, he didn't do that.
What would it mean if someone tried to say slavery never happened in the U.S., for instance? Or that Mormons weren't mobbed and murdered and driven from their homes in Illinois?
When you deliberately falsify history like that (and it's very hard to see how it can be less than deliberate) you are perpetrating another travesty upon those who died. You are adding insult to injury. I do think nobody does that without some sort of political agenda. At the very least, it has to be willful ignorance.
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