Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.

Released 1999
Features Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
Directed by Errol Morris

The hangman has no friends. That truth, I think, is the key to understanding Fred A. Leuchter Jr., a man who built up a nice little business designing Death Row machines, and then lost it when he became a star on the Holocaust denial circuit. Leuchter, the subject of Errol Morris' documentary "Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.," is a lonely man of limited insight who is grateful to be liked--even by Nazi apologists.

Fred Leuchter, the son of a prison warden, stumbled into the Death Row business more or less by accident. An engineer by training, he found himself inspired by the need for more efficient and "humane" execution devices. Leuchter's trip to Auschwitz was the turning point in his career. He was asked by Ernst Zundel, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, to be an expert witness at his trial in Canada. Zundel financed Leuchter's 1988 trip to Auschwitz, during which he chopped off bits of brick and mortar in areas said to be gas chambers and had them analyzed for cyanide residue. His conclusion: The chambers never contained gas. The "Leuchter Report" has since been widely quoted by those who deny that the Holocaust took place. There is a flaw in his science, however. The laboratory technician who tested the samples for Leuchter was later startled to discover the use being made of his findings. Cyanide would penetrate bricks only to the depth of one-tenth of a human hair, he says. By breaking off large chunks and pulverizing them, Leuchter had diluted his sample by 100,000 times, not even taking into account the 50 years of weathering that had passed. To find cyanide would have been a miracle.

No matter; Leuchter became a favorite after-dinner speaker on the neo-Nazi circuit, and the camera observes how his face lights up and his whole body seems to lean into applause, how happy he is to shake hands with his new friends. Other people might shy away from the pariah status of a Holocaust denier. The hangman is already a pariah and finds his friends where he can. Like all of Morris' films, "Mr. Death" provides us with no comfortable place to stand. We often leave his documentaries not sure if he liked his subjects or was ridiculing them. He doesn't make it easy for us with simple moral labels. Human beings, he argues, are fearsomely complex and can get their minds around very strange ideas indeed. Sometimes it is possible to hate the sin and love the sinner. Poor Fred. What a dope, what a dupe, what a lonely, silly man.

Summary by Roger Ebert