“Mr. Leuchter Has a Point!”
If you’re like us and many other revisionists, you’ve. His career as America's foremost expert in wondered and worried about what’s happened to Fred Leuchter humane execution ruined, thanks to his extraordinary findings and testimony on the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, forced to dodge trial by a kangaroo court in Germany, Leuchter seemed to go underground as his professional and personal life crumbled. There were even rumors that Leuchter was renouncing his famous report, the first quantitative forensic investigation of the Auschwitz gas chambers ever published.
Early this year, however, Fred Leuchter was back in the public eye, thanks (if that's the word) to the efforts of a quirky but eminent maker of independent films named Errol Morris. Morris, it seems, has an unhealthy interest in death in its various forms, and that led him to the ex-executioner Morris calls, in what is also the working title of his film, “Mr. Death.”
Errol Morris – forced to do a little revising of his own.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Errol_Morris_by_Bridget_Laudien.jpg)
As a six-page article on Morris, Leuchter, and the film that appeared in the February 1, 1999 New Yorker makes clear, “Mr. Death” was undertaken to make a gruesome fool out of Leuchter and to burlesque his research in the gas chambers. But when Morris showed an early version of the film to an audience at Harvard, according to the piece:
Morris described to [writer Mark Singer] the screening of an early rough cut at Harvard, which had left him shaken. “It seemed that that audience had no place to stand outside of Fred,” he said.
“They became trapped in his ego. They took him quite literally. And when the film was over there were people in the room who wondered whether the Holocaust had really happened.”
Or, as Dutch exterminationist professor Robert-Jan Van Pelt described the same incident to the Dutch paper Het Parool (January 27, 1999): “When he showed the first version to American students, many reacted with, 'Mr. Leuchter has a point.'”
By now it should be evident that Fred Leuchter is sticking to his guns on the what he found at Auschwitz and other alleged gassing centers of the Third Reich. It's also clear that even in a film crafted carefully to discredit Leuchter and revisionism, his earnestness, his expertise, and his revisionist method come across loud clear, and unanswerable—at least by Errol Morris and his exterminationist advisers.
According to Mark Singer's New Yorker piece, Morris has worked frantically to redo the film, which offends not only by letting Leuchter get the upper hand intellectually but also by arousing sympathy for Leuchter among fair-minded viewers repelled by the legal and economic hounding Leuchter endured. Grim irony: if the “indie” filmmaker can't put away “Mr. Death” this time around he may have dug his own professional grave. Bad enough that students can now watch the director of the Auschwitz State Museum explaining that gas chamber I is a postwar “reconstruction”—we can't have them hearing persuasive revisionist arguments on the other Auschwitz gas chambers from their movie screens!
Hitchens, Morris—something's the air. The lure of the last taboo? The sense that the taboo-keepers are out of hand and need to be hit—at last—in their Holocaust holy of holies? The growing recognition that men and women such as Fred Leuchter, Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, Ingrid Weckert, and many, many more, can be bankrupted attacked fined, jailed, and worse—but continue, unbroken, to say the truth?
Something's in the air. Mr. Leuchter has a point.
Author
Bibliographic information about this document: Smith's Report, no. 62, February-March 1999, pp. 5f.
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a