Weird Science

"Everything that was done," says Fred Leuchter of his search for the "truth" at Auschwitz, "was done in the best possible taste."

What Fred did was visit Auschwitz at the behest of a neo-Nazi to determine, scientifically, if the camp had housed a gas chamber; in other words, to determine, scientifically, if the Holocaust ever occurred. In the best possible taste.

Errol Morris' last outing, the brilliant "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control," introduced four men with bizarre occupations: mole-rat scientist, robot scientist, lion tamer, and topiary gardener. These professions, and therefore these men, were drawn toward life. In his latest, must-see documentary, "Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.," Cambridge's Morris outdoes himself, turning his Interrotron on something, and someone, quite the opposite: the "science" of Holocaust denial and execution technician Fred Leuchter.

In his thick Massachusetts accent, Fred details his rise to dizzying heights in the execution equipment field. Morris' decision to film the engineer in slow motion as he explains how the electric chair works makes Fred seem quirky rather than dangerous. Morris is not stacking the deck in Fred's favor; he is merely using his camera to record Fred as the world sees him. When Fred's now-ex-wife first met him at her restaurant, she was surprised when a fellow patron told her Fred "kill[s] people for a living."

Fred does not merely kill people for a living; he tries to kill them better. He objects to the use of decrepit execution equipment, which he says results in torture instead of "humane execution." At his "own time and expense," Fred created a "failsafe chair." Botched executions such as Jesse Tafero's in Florida (which Fred describes in excruciating, emotionless detail and which I won't go into here) become impossible in Fred's chair.

Soon Fred is a star. Tennessee enlists him to rebuild its chair; New Jersey invites him to work on a lethal injection machine after hearing about the helmet he developed for North Carolina executions. "The reasoning here," says a self-satisfied Fred, "is I built electric chairs, therefore I can build lethal injection, therefore I can build gallows, therefore I can look into gas chambers."

His résumé attracts the attention of Ernst Zündel, a neo-Nazi on trial in Canada for distributing material denying the Holocaust's existence. (Zündel was charged under a little-used Canadian law, similar to one in Germany, which prohibits the publication of statements "known to be false" and which could provoke racial intolerance) Zündel says the Holocaust is "nothing but anti-German propaganda," and intends to "prove it by finding an American expert, because in America, they still use gas."

That expert, of course, is Fred. Apparently without questioning the ethics or validity of his assignment, Fred flies to Poland with his wife of one month (he describes the trip as their honeymoon), a cinematographer, and a translator to prove once and for all that there was no gas chamber at Auschwitz.

And it is here, as we watch Fred chipping away at the walls of Krema II, which historian Robert Jan van Pelt calls "the epicenter of human suffering," where "more humans lost their life than on any other place on this planet," that we realize Fred is far less harmless than some tricks of photography may suggest. He is an unquestioning, unoriginal thinker, the perfect choice for doing this dirty work at Auschwitz.

Morris uses the original video footage of Fred in Auschwitz. In a movie that recalls but never uses famously horrific images of the death camp, the sight of Fred scraping and collecting and sealing is pretty horrific itself. Finding no drains or vents in Krema II, Fred deduces, "In my best engineering opinion, I don't think [it] could have been used" for gassing. Forget the undressing room; forget the historical records which substantiate that the Germans dynamited the camp to hide the evidence. Such is Fred's ego that he can hardly conceive of death equipment being built without his expertise. If the camp were to be made into a gas chamber, he says, "I would be the one to do it."

His testimony at Zündel's trial is thrown out by the judge, proven to be based on poor science, but Fred becomes the darling of Holocaust deniers and takes his show on the road. He speaks at international conferences and publishes his findings in "The Leuchter Report," which is translated into many languages. Chemist James Roth, who performed the chemical analysis on Fred's "samples," says, "If they go in with blinders, they will see what they want to see."

It's interesting to speculate what could allow Fred, a history major at Boston University, to be so easily swayed into believing the Holocaust was a hoax. Possibly the same thing that led to the construction of the gas chambers in the first place: more regard for the executioner than the executed. "Why didn't they just shoot them?" Fred asks, pondering the question of the Germans killing their "slave labor." During the early stages of the implementation of the Final Solution, the Germans did shoot the Jews, but it was not an efficient way to decimate a population of millions. Besides, psychologically it was hard on the soldiers. Gassing was swifter, neater, anonymous. Fred expressed the same concern for prison guards and civilians who handle inmates and carry out executions. Early in the film he says, "Our execution equipment comes with a drip pan," which protects the executioner's hands from the prisoner's "oozing body fluids." In addition to this loss of control over bodily functions being "a disgusting and degrading thing" for the prisoner, it is downright dangerous for the guards, who "sometimes have to stand on a damp floor, running the risk of getting shocked." Urine is highly conductive; "I think everybody knows this."

Not everybody. This is why Fred is the expert, as he keeps reminding us. Just as his subject scratches the walls of the gas chamber at Auschwitz and finds nothing, Errol Morris scratches the surface of Fred Leuchter and finds a different, terrifying kind of nothing: a void; a mind profoundly closed to historical fact, ironically enough in the name of science.