February 7, 2004
Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.
Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. is another
documentary by the noted documentarian, Errol
Morris, who did other well-known factual films like The Thin
Blue Line (a movie I'd love to see but isn't available on DVD yet)
and, recently, The Fog of War, an interview with Robert
S. McNamara. Mr. Death focuses on Fred Leuchter, Jr., the son
of a Massachusetts prison worker who becomes an expert in the
manufacture of death penalty devices like electric chairs and lethal
injection stations. After being ask to testify for a revisionist
Nazi, his life gets completely destroyed.
The film opens with Leuchter talking about his death penalty devices, and how he became involved in the manufacture of these things. While a staunch death penalty advocate, he also wants to use a "humane" method of dealing death, so he designs the "perfect" electric chair. The clinical discussions of botched electric chair and other death penalty sentences are some of the most chilling I've ever heard. As a vehement death penalty opponent, it really made my skin crawl to hear about society-sanctioned murder and how to best achieve the savage result.
Then he gets asked, as an self-taught expert in dealing death, to testify for neo-Nazi Ernst Z�ndel in a Canadian trial. Z�ndel is on trial for printing false history to incite racism, due to his pamphlets arguing that the gas chambers in the German concentration camps are a myth. He asks Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and Birkenau to examine what is left of the "purported" gas chambers and see if, in his "expert" opinion, they could be used for mass killings.
After a laughably inept trip, filmed by an accompanying videographer, Leuchter comes to the conclusion that there are no gas chambers at these concentration camps. His most important "evidence" is that an independent test on the wall scrapings he took show no evidence of the gas used. He becomes a hero to the "revisionist" movement, lauded by folks like Z�ndel and David Irving, as a truth seeker.
Of course, it isn't the "truth" at all. The chemist who did the tests explains how and why they failed to detect anything. A German journalist explains several other things, including the chilling discussion of one of the largest gas chambers at Auschwitz, which he calls the "epicenter of horror", where over 500,000 Jews were gassed to death. The one thing that Leuchter says that is believable is just how unbelievable it all is.
After the trial, Leuchter's life falls apart, as his state contracts are voided, his wife leaves him and he can't get a job, due to his now well known Nazi sympathies. It still seems to me he is a nerd who just doesn't know any better, and he seems to be paying far beyond his crime. But Morris lets you decide.
It is a very interesting and disturbing film, on a lot of levels, from the visceral repulsion of the gas chamber to the destroyed "mouse" of a man at the end of the film. It is told in a somewhat confusing manner, with lots of strange camera shots, fuzzy pictures and "re-enactments". The timeline is confusing and you wonder just how some of the shots came to be, and Morris is in no hurry to explain it to you. Probably much more of a film maker than most documentaries (see, for instance Startup.com, a much more conventional documentary). But it is an eye-opener nonetheless, and worth renting.
Buy Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. at DVDPlanet
Fred A. Leuchter Jr., James Roth, David Irving, Suzanne Tabasky, Robert Jan Van Pelt, Shelly Shapiro
The story of Fred Leuchter, an expert in capital punishment, who published that there was no evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, unleashing a firestorm of controversy and ruining his career.
Posted by jdarnold at February 7, 2004 10:08 AM
