Fred A. Leuchter

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Frederick Arthur Leuchter (born February 7, 1943 in Malden , Massachusetts ) is an American Holocaust denier . In 1988 he wrote the so-called Leuchter Report . In it he tried to prove that no gassings could have taken place in the gas chambers of the National Socialist extermination camps .

education and profession

Leuchter grew up in Massachusetts . In 1964 he graduated from Boston University with a bachelor of arts degree in humanities . He claims to have earned a reputation as a technical and organizational expert in execution equipment by designing and maintaining electric chairs , lethal injection devices, and gas chambers for correctional facilities in the United States . He awarded himself the title of Execution Engineer and also tried to form a professional profile as an Execution Technician (execution technician ). According to a report in the New York Times , the focus of his work was the development of "humane" methods of execution. His title as engineer and execution specialist, for example by the French neo-Nazi Robert Faurisson , was fictitious.

Litigation report

In 1988 the German Ernst Zündel , then living in Toronto , Canada , was charged with his holocaust-denying activities. As part of his defense, he commissioned Fred Leuchter as an expert to check whether people were gassed in the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps. Leuchter toured the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek camps and took some unauthorized samples from the walls of the gas chambers there. In his report he stated that no significant residues of the hydrocyanic acid gas Zyklon B used for gasification were detectable. The premises could therefore not have been used for mass gassings. For the chemical analysis, Leuchter referred to Alpha Analytical Laboratories , who were not informed about the purpose of the analyzes and therefore crushed the submitted samples with a mortar and examined them for substance concentrations that would typically have been expected in recent industrial chemical accidents. The analyzes were negative and Leuchter contradicted in his report based on the findings of Holocaust research that are generally considered historically secure .

The further course of the process called Leuchter's professional qualifications, methodology and measurement results into question in several ways:

  • His claim that he was qualified as an engineer turned out to be a false statement. He had to admit that he was wrongly using the professional title “engineer” and that he had virtually no specialist knowledge in physics , chemistry and toxicology .
  • He had only been to Auschwitz concentration camp for a total of three days and to Majdanek for one day without informing the respective management of the museum facilities. The actual investigation period of the gas chambers was even shorter and did not permit comprehensive investigations into chemical residues from gas use more than 40 years ago.
  • The methodology and subsequent evaluation of the "samples" taken from the walls of the gas chambers remained in the dark, so that the conclusions of the report had to be interpreted as pure assertions.

As a result, Ernst Zündel was convicted of "spreading false news" under the Canadian False News Act . The presiding judge stated in his judgment:

The opinion is expressed that there were never gassings or executions there. In my opinion, and after what has been said here, it is beyond his [Leuchter's] ability to be able to represent such an opinion in a well-founded manner ... He lacks the competence to judge what could or could not be done in the places mentioned as he claims across the board in his report.

Aftermath

In 1990, the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Engineers in Boston initiated proceedings against Leuchter. He was accused of misusing the job title of Engineer in order to “deceive the general public”. Leuchter then issued a written declaration in which he assured that he had never been an engineer in the legally protected framework of the state of Massachusetts .

In 1999, Errol Morris created a film documentary about him under the title Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. His and Zündel's supporters claimed that Jewish groups had persecuted Leuchter, causing him to lose his company and destroy his family.

Technical refutation

Richard J. Green and Jamie McCarthy refuted the Leuchter Report in a lawsuit brought by David Irving .

Leuchter's conclusion from the concentration of the cyanide compounds is generally not accepted. Hydrocyanic acid is significantly more toxic to warm-blooded animals (and humans are included) than it is to lice. Clothing infected by vermin therefore had to be exposed to the gas for considerably longer and in considerably higher concentrations. To kill lice, the gas is used in a concentration of up to 16,000 ppm (parts per million) (1.6%) for a duration of up to 72 hours. On the other hand, even 300 ppm over a period of 15 minutes are fatal to humans.

In contrast to delousing, smaller amounts of hydrogen cyanide were used in the gas chambers of the crematoria for a shorter period of time. Therefore, the hydrogen cyanide released could only form a few cyanide compounds when people were gassed.

The disinfestation chambers intended for delousing had remained intact at the end of the war. The SS tried to blow up the gas chambers of the crematoria more or less successfully (parts of crematorium II and III have been destroyed, crematorium IV and V are ruins) in order to hide them from the advancing Red Army . The destroyed buildings were thus exposed to the weather for over 40 years, and their walls were partially washed out considerably.

The gas chamber of Crematorium I in the main camp Auschwitz has been preserved . After the construction of the Birkenau subcamp , its function as a gas chamber was superfluous and a protective bunker was built from it. After the war, the original version of the gas chamber was rebuilt for visitors to the Auschwitz Museum . Its walls also contain traces of cyanide compounds; the low concentration can be explained by the fact that this gas chamber was only in operation for a short time and was converted into a protective bunker. The lower concentrations are therefore to be expected in gasification chambers for several reasons and therefore no indication that the gasifications could not have taken place.

Leuchter's conclusions with regard to the risk of explosion are not recognized because an air-cyclone B mixture is only explosive if the concentration of cyclone B is correspondingly high. Hydrocyanic acid at a concentration of 300 ppm (0.03%) is fatal to humans after a few minutes; however, the minimum concentration of hydrocyanic acid required for an explosion is 56,000 ppm (5.6%). The gas mixture used for the killing could therefore be used in the immediate vicinity of the crematoria without the risk of explosion.

With regard to the period of time observed after the execution and the evacuation of the gas chambers, Leuchter's statement is criticized in that, contrary to what he claims, there are certainly ventilation systems in the gas chambers (suction devices that should detoxify the room in a short time after the gasification process by Zyklon B. ) were installed. These facilities were dismantled shortly before the liberation of Auschwitz and taken to Mauthausen concentration camp . The toxicity was known from many years of experience with delousing items of clothing, which is why precautionary measures were taken that made it unnecessary to take a longer out of service. In addition, gas masks were often used when clearing the gas chamber.

The maximum workplace concentration currently valid for hydrocyanic acid is 1.9 ml / m³ = 1.9 ppm = 2.1 mg / m³. This value falls below this value very quickly in closed rooms when air from the environment enters the room. In addition, hydrogen cyanide boils at 25.7 ° C under normal conditions and therefore behaves like a vapor in the vicinity of this temperature range . A permanent stay of the substance inside the gas chambers over a longer period was therefore not to be expected at any point in time. An evacuation after 30 minutes is therefore not an indication of an invention, but completely compatible with the technical conditions of the gas chambers.

Leuchter has nevertheless come forward with his theses at various congresses of the Holocaust revisionists and has found imitators. He was sentenced to a fine in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1991 when he publicly denied the Holocaust as a witness in the trial of Günter Deckert . In 1994 he was arrested again for this.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New York Times report of October 13, 1990
  2. ^ Samuel Salzborn : Global anti-Semitism. A search for traces in the abyss of modernity. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim, Basel 2018, p. 69.
  3. ↑ cf. the analyzes of Jean-Claude Pressac in Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers. , Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989. Online at holocaust-history.org ( Memento of the original from June 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.holocaust-history.org
  4. ↑ Werner Wegner: No mass gassings in Auschwitz? On the criticism of the Leuchter report. In: Uwe Backes , Eckhard Jesse , Rainer Zitelmann (eds.) The shadows of the past. Impulses for the historicization of National Socialism , Propylaen, Berlin 1990, p. 455; Hellmuth Auerbach: Leuchter Report. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Legends, Lies, Prejudices. A dictionary of contemporary history. dtv, Munich 1994, p. 148.
  5. ^ Sybille Steinbacher. Auschwitz. history and post-history. CH Beck, Munich 2004, p. 98 f.
  6. ^ Entry on hydrogen cyanide in the GESTIS substance database of the IFA , accessed on July 16, 2015(JavaScript required) .
  7. ↑ see also: The Leuchter Report, Holocaust Denial & The Big Lie at the Nizkor project
personal data
SURNAME Leuchter, Fred A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leuchter, Frederick Arthur (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Holocaust Denier
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Malden , Massachusetts