The end of a myth: Foreword to the “Leuchter Report”

Fred A. Leuchter, 45, is an engineer living near Boston who has specialised in the design of execution hardware used in prisons throughout the United States. One of his major projects has been the design of a new gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri.

In January of 1988 I was in Toronto, Canada, assisting in the defence of Mr Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian who was on trial for spreading false news [sic] by publishing Did Six Million Really Die?, a booklet that challenged the prevailing view according to which six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, primarily through the use of gas chambers utilising hydrocyanic gas (Zyklon B).

Ernst Zündel had previously been tried on the same count in 1985. The trial lasted seven weeks and ended in his conviction and sentencing to fifteen months’ imprisonment. In January 1987 the Ontario court of appeal overturned the decision because of grave errors in law and ordered a new trial, which began on January 18, 1988 and, at the time of this writing, is still proceeding.

My first conversations with Fred Leuchter took place in Boston on February 3 and 4, 1988. I was impressed with the conciseness of his answers to my questions and his ability to explain every detail of gassing procedures. He confirmed for me the particularly dangerous character of an execution by hydrocyanic gas.

Executions by this gas were carried out for the first time in the United States in 1924; but, still in 1988, the construction of execution gas chambers runs into grave difficulties and, in particular, the problem of airtightness. I noted in passing that Fred Leuchter had not asked himself any questions on the prevailing opinion of the “Holocaust” of the Jews.

On my return from Boston to Toronto and after my account to Ernst Zündel of my conversations with Leuchter, Zündel decided to ask the latter to prepare an forensic study of the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek.

Leuchter accepted the mission after a weekend in Toronto spent examining wartime aerial photographs of the camps, plans of the crematoria and “gas chambers”, documents on Zyklon B and photo slides taken of the sites in the 1970’s by the Swedish researcher Ditlieb Felderer.

On February 25, 1988 Leuchter left for Poland together with his wife Carolyn, his draughtsman Howard Miller, cinematographer Jurgen Neumann and Polish language interpreter Tijudar Rudolph. He returned eight days later, on March 3.

Leuchter then wrote his report of 192 pages, annexes included. His finding was clear: the proof was there, overwhelming, that there were no execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek and that the alleged gas chambers at these sites could not have been, then or now, utilised or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.

On April 20 and 21, 1988 he gave evidence in the witness box in Toronto. He first replied to the questions put by Zündel’s defence lawyer, Douglas H. Christie, assisted by Keltie Zubko, and then faced cross-examination by the Crown prosecutor, John Pearson, assisted throughout the trial by another prosecutor and a clerk, not without frequent consultations with Jewish advisors seated immediately behind him in the courtroom.

The questioning and cross-examination took place before a judge and an eleven-member jury. The tension in the courtroom was extreme. I was seated beside a number of revisionist experts, amongst whom William Lindsey, who until his retirement in 1986 was chief research chemist for Dupont Corporation. I believe that all those present in the courtroom, independently of personal opinions on the subject of the “Holocaust”, were fully conscious of participating in an event of historical import. The myth of the “gas chambers” was coming to an end.

On the previous day the director of the Missouri State Penitentiary, Bill Armontrout, had explained in his evidence the procedure and mode of operation of a gas chamber functioning with hydrocyanic acid. Every attentive listener discovered that, if it was so difficult to execute a single person by gas, then the alleged execution of hundreds of thousands of persons by the Germans with Zyklon B would be the equivalent of squaring the circle.

The witness after Leuchter was Dr James Roth, Ph. D. (Cornell University), manager of Alpha Analytical Laboratories in Ashland, Massachusetts. His exposé dealt with the analysis of samples taken from the walls, floors, ceilings and other places inside the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz-I and Birkenau. The examinations revealed either a total absence or an extremely low level of detectable quantities of cyanide, with but one exception: reference sample no. 32 taken from delousing building 1 at Birkenau. These results, reproduced in the form of a graphic in Appendix I of the Leuchter Report, were displayed on a screen before the jury. The difference between, on the one hand, the huge quantity of cyanide detected in the delousing building and, on the other, the non-existent or infinitesimal quantity found in the alleged “gas chambers”, was spectacular. (In my view, the infinitesimal quantities of cyanide found in certain crematoria probably result from the disinfestation of those enclosures during the war.)

I think I was the first to say that any study of the alleged German “gas chambers” functioning with Zyklon B should begin with an examination of the American gas chambers. From 1977, through the intermediary of an American friend, Eugene C. Brugger, a lawyer in New York, I had begun an inquiry in that direction. Six American penitentiaries had kindly replied to my questions: those of San Quentin, California; Jefferson City, Missouri; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Raleigh, North Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland and Florence, Arizona. At the time I was compelled to conclude that only an expert in American gas chamber technology could, in the end, determine whether the German “gas chambers” could have been utilised as described for us in the “Holocaust” literature.

In the years that followed, my articles on the German “gas chambers” always referred to the American gas chambers. Among those articles were “The Rumour of Auschwitz” or “the Problem of the Gas Chambers“, published on December 29, 1978 in the French daily Le Monde, and a lengthy (written) interview published in the August 1979 issue of the Italian periodical Storia Illustrata. I visited the gas chamber in Baltimore in September 1979 and brought back eight photographs together with some documentation. In September 1979, at a conference held in New York under the auspices of Fritz Berg, I displayed the “Gas Chamber Procedure Check Sheet” of the Baltimore penitentiary and showed its implications. In 1980, in the first issue of the newly-created Journal of Historical review, I published an article entitled The Mechanics of Gassing, in which I described the procedures of execution in a gas chamber in the United States. In the same year I published, in Serge Thion’s Vérité Historique ou Vérité Politique?, the eight photographs of the Baltimore gas chamber [now included in the presentation on this site of the aforementioned Gas Chamber Procedure Check Sheet – translator’s note]. My video entitled Le Problème des chambres à gaz, made in 1981, began with an analysis of the American gas chambers. In 1983 I prepared for our Institute for Historical Review (Los Angeles) a book in English on the “Holocaust” controversy; there again, I returned to the subject of the American gas chambers. For the first time the list of questions put to the penitentiary officials and the answers I had received would be published. But that book was not to come out: on July 4, 1984, American Independence Day, an arson attack totally destroyed the Institute’s archives. This was a financial catastrophe and a number of projects, amongst which that of my book, were abandoned.

The “Holocaust” may seem a subject of enormous proportions. But, as Arthur R. Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, has said, it is a giant with feet of clay. To perceive its feet of clay, one need only go to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Wilhelm Stäglich has said it: “the extermination thesis stands or falls with the allegation that Auschwitz was a ‘death factory’.” For my part, I maintain that the whole mystery of Auschwitz is concentrated in the 65 square metres of the alleged “gas chamber” of Auschwitz I and in the 210 square metres of the alleged “gas chamber” of Birkenau. The Allies should have made a forensic examination immediately after the war by the Allies, but no such thing happened at the time and has not happened since. The Polish examining magistrate, Jan Sehn, ordered some forensic examinations at Auschwitz but not of the alleged execution gas chambers themselves.

Certain revisionist studies have shown that the enclosures alleged to have served as homicidal “gas chambers” cannot have been used for that purpose. Ditlieb Felderer has published photographs that reveal the scanty construction of the “gas chambers'” vents and doors and the absence of any hydrocyanic acid (“Prussian blue”) stains. I myself had discovered, on March 19, 1976, in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum (archives well guarded by the communist officials), the plans of those alleged “gas chambers” and was the first to publish them in a series of books and articles (see A look back at my discovery, on March 19, 1976, of the building plans for the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria). I showed those plans at the Institute for Historical Review’s first conference in Los Angeles in 1979. Mr Zündel was present. Those gas chambers had been, in reality – as could be read on the plans –, cold rooms for bodies: Leichenhalle for Krema I (later transformed into an air-raid shelter) and Leichenkeller for Krema II.

Still, in order to provide a wholly scientific confirmation for what simple common sense made evident and for what the revisionists’ research work and documents revealed, a specialist of American gas chambers was needed. I was despairing of finding such a specialist and, to tell the truth, I had little hope of finding a man who, not merely being well versed in gas chamber technology, would have courage enough to conduct that kind of investigation in a communist country and then publish its results if they confirmed the revisionist findings.

Happily, I was wrong.

Fred Leuchter was going to be the specialist in question. He went to Poland, made a forensic investigation, wrote a report and testified in favour of Ernst Zündel before a Canadian court. Thus, without lustre, he entered History.

Leuchter is a man of modest appearance and calm determination; he expresses himself with precision. He could have been an excellent professor and possesses a real gift for having one grasp the finest subtleties of a complicated problem. I asked him whether he feared any dangerous consequences; his answer was “A fact is a fact”.

After reading the Leuchter Report, the famous British historian David Irving declared, on April 22, 1988, in the witness box in Toronto, that it was a “overwhelming” document, bound to become essential for any historian of the Second World War.

Without Ernst Zündel, practically nothing of what happened in the scope of that trial would have been conceivable. He sacrifices all in his search for historical accuracy. He lives in difficult conditions in the face of influential and powerful enemies. The repression he undergoes is ceaseless and at time takes on the wickedest forms. But he possesses a strong personality and an undeniable charisma. He is very good at analysing situations, assessing the power relations, at drawing an advantage from what is weighing him down. From the four corners of the earth he calls on and mobilises people with the required skills. The man is profound; he is a genius combining common sense and a penetrating insight into beings and situations.

Perhaps he will, once again, be sent to prison because of his research and convictions; perhaps a deportation procedure awaits him. Anything is possible. Anything can happen when there occur a crisis of the mind and a such a vast revision of certain historical concepts. Revisionism is the great intellectual adventure of the end of this century. In any event, Ernst Zündel will have won. He will have been that pacifist and that activist who carries the day by virtue of reason and persuasion alone.

Toronto, April 23, 1988

 

P.S. On May 11, 1988 the jury found Zündel guilty of spreading information about the “Holocaust” that he knew to false. He was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment and granted bail after signing a gag order, agreeing not to write or speak about the “Holocaust” until the end of the appeal proceedings. He thus joined Galileo.

P.S.S. On August 27, 1992 the Supreme Court of Canada quashed Zündel’s conviction and declared the law under which he was dragged through the courts for nine years unconstitutional. The Canadian government has refused to apologise to Zündel for the ordeal inflicted on him and has turned down his request for compensation for his legal costs etc.

[article first published in the Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1988]