The Genesis of the Leuchter Report

It all started with the trials staged in the 1980s against Canadian revisionist of German origin Ernst Zündel. In 1981, Zündel – who died a few months ago, in August 2017 – had republished Richard Harwood’s revisionist brochure: Did Six Million Really Die?. During a first trial, in 1985, Zündel was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. The verdict was overturned in 1987. A new trial began in January 1988. Zündel instructed his lawyer’s assistant Barbara Kulaszka to contact the chief wardens of several U.S. prisons in an attempt to convince them to come to court and to explain to the jury the operation of a homicidal gas chamber. Bill Armontrout, head warden of the Jefferson City (Missouri) penitentiary agreed to come and testify that no one in the United States knew more about how gas chambers worked than the Boston technician Fred Leuchter. Subsequently, the French professor Dr. Robert Faurisson, who at the time was Zündel’s defense advisor, went to visit Leuchter. Leuchter agreed to come to Toronto to examine the documentation on the Nazi “gas chambers” collected by Zündel and Faurisson. Then, as Faurisson writes:[1]

“After that, at Zündel's expense, he [Leuchter] left for Poland with a secretary (his wife), a draftsman, a video-cameraman and an interpreter. He came back and drew up a 192-page report (including appendices). He also brought back 32 samples taken, on the one hand, from the crematories of Auschwitz and Birkenau at the site of the homicidal ‘gassings’ and, on the other hand, in a disinfection gas chamber at Birkenau. His conclusion was simple: there had never been any homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, Birkenau, or Majdanek.

On April 20 and 21, 1988, Fred Leuchter appeared on the witness stand in the Toronto courtroom. He told the story of his investigation and presented his conclusions.”

Fred Leuchter According to Wikipedia

Some falsehoods on behalf of Fred Leuchter can be found in the homonymous entry at Wikipedia. Before examining them, however, it is pertinent to make a caveat. The Wikipedia text contains expressions such as “practicing engineering” and “professional engineer.” It must be kept in mind that in most other languages, the term engineer refers exclusively to individuals who have an academic degree in engineering, whereas in the English language it has a far broader meaning. In addition to academic engineers, the term can also refer to any kind of technician.[2]

Let’s now see what Wikipedia writes in the paragraph “Education and career” (all emphases are mine):

“Leuchter received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Boston University in 1964. He holds patents for a geodetic instrument and an electronic sextant. In 1991 Leuchter faced charges of practicing engineering without a license issued by the Board of Registration of Professional Engineers and of Land Surveyors, which regulates professional engineers, a violation of Massachusetts law. As a result of those charges, Leuchter signed a consent decree with the board, in which he stated that he was not and had never been registered as a professional engineer, despite having represented himself as one. He settled with prosecutors by serving two years of probation and agreeing to stop disseminating documents in which he presented himself as an engineer, including the Leuchter Report. In a speech given over a year later, Leuchter claimed that:

a spurious criminal complaint was filed against me in the Massachusetts court system with the intent of destroying my reputation by putting me in prison for three months.

In point of fact, a license is not required in Massachusetts, or any other state, unless the engineer is involved in construction of buildings, and is certifying compliance with specifications. […]

As confirmation of the spurious nature of this charge, it should be pointed out there are more than fifty thousand practicing engineers in Massachusetts, of whom only five thousand are licensed. Although the state’s licensing law has been in effect since 1940, there has been no record of any prosecution for this offense.”

On all this, I contacted – via Facebook – the same Leuchter, and here’s what he answered:[3]

“I was illegally charged with practicing as a licensed engineer. You needn’t be licensed to be an engineer. I never represented myself as licensed. There was a consent agreement between myself, the DA [District Attorney] and the Board of Engineers. Since I never represented myself as licensed, that did and does not apply. The Agreement prevented the DA and the Jewish organization from persecuting me. I agreed never to say I was licensed for a two year period unless I became licensed. The Licensing Board was required to accept my application for licensing and to issue said license based on my background, if I applied. I did not wish to be licensed then or now (state interference).”

So much from Leuchter. For my part, I observe that the document signed at the time by Leuchter was a consent decree, a settlement agreement that does not include an admission of guilt on the part of the person concerned. Therefore, it seems unlikely that he was given “probation,” which instead presupposes guilt (and a conviction).

Francesco Rotondi’s Slanders

In November 2005, Francesco Rotondi, cardiologist at the San Giuseppe Moscati Hospital in Avellino, published a book titled Honeymoon at Auschwitz: Reflections on Holocaust Denial.[4] It is a full-fledged anti-revisionist libel, filled not only with falsehoods, but also with pure slander against revisionists. At the time, Carlo Mattogno responded to this book for his part. Mattogno’s answer, however exhaustive it may be, concerned almost exclusively the objections brought against his own work. It did not take into consideration the poisonous ad hominem attacks made by Rotondi against Zündel and Leuchter.[5] I try to respond to these, despite the time that has passed, first of all because Rotondi’s book was favorably received by Italy’s academia (before being published by an Italian science publisher, it had been presented as a thesis) and also because I think it is always useful to show the bias of revisionism’s detractors.

The two sections of Rotondi’s book that interest us here are as follows:

1. “The Leuchter Report or the Honeymoon at Auschwitz by a So-called Engineer” (“Il Rapporto Leuchter ovvero la luna di miele ad Auschwitz di un sedicente ingegnere,” pp. 67-70) and
2. “Leuchter’s credibility” (“La credibilità di Leuchter,” pp. 70-73).

Rotondi begins as follows (all emphases are mine):

“It is the well-known French revisionist, the scholar Robert Faurisson, who comes up with the idea of scientifically demonstrating the inexistence of the gas chambers, a subject he had been working on for some time. He chooses as an ‘expert’ the American Fred A. Leuchter, who called himself a chief engineer, although he never graduated in engineering, and who presented himself as a ‘specialist in the design and manufacture’ of gas chambers intended for the implementation of capital punishment in the USA. In February 1988, thanks to a large sum paid by neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel, he was sent to Poland. His fresh bride Carolyn, an industrial designer who incredibly speaks of it as her honeymoon, an interpreter and a cameraman, a friend of Zündel, also participate in the expedition.”

In a footnote, Rotondi defines the agreement between Leuchter and the Board of Engineers as “judicial plea bargain.”

In the second section under review here, Rotondi’s claim that Leuchter boasted to have a degree in engineering is the first slander in that section. From the text of the agreement it is clear that the dispute did not concern a graduate degree but Leuchter’s failure to register with the Board of Engineers. If Leuchter had indeed boasted of such a degree, there would have been no agreement, and he would have gone straight to prison. From this point of view, it is also tendentious to have defined the aforementioned “Consent Decree” as a “judicial plea bargaining,” which instead presupposes both an admission of guilt and a subsequent conviction.

From the choice of sources on which Rotondi based his study, I conclude that he knows the English language. But then, he should know that the English term “engineer” corresponds only partially to what Europeans mean when using that term. That the English term “engineer” can also refer to a “specialized technician” is stated in all dictionaries. Hence, Rotondi has no excuse whatsoever. As to the fact that Leuchter has defined the expedition to Poland as his honeymoon, we need to clarify: Rotondi’s source for this is evidently Errol Morris’s movie Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., a documentary that has Leuchter as its protagonist. Well, Rotondi omits to report the full sentence stated by Leuchter (starting at 31:04):

“We were married for less than a month when we went. Although she doesn’t like to hear it, I normally tell her: that was her honeymoon. That’s not a particular good place to go for a honeymoon – Poland.”

When it comes to putting a revisionist in a bad light, they evidently latch on to everything. Rotondi then continues by targeting the person who had commissioned the Leuchter Report (all emphases mine):

“Ernst Zündel is a folkloric and boisterous German neo-Nazi fugitive in Canada, who was being prosecuted at the time for spreading Harwood’s negationist booklet Did six million really die?, a big man who likes to perform in public dressed up in various carnival attires and who protests, surrounded by equally ridiculous bodyguards, by parading with a cross on his shoulders or even by wearing a Jewish camp uniform, with the telephone number on a hard hat.”

To complete his denigration of Zündel, Rotondi adds in a footnote that “Zündel is, among other things, the author of two curious volumes: UFO’s: Nazi Secret Weapons, and The Hitler We Loved and Why, whose titles alone are indicative.”

First of all, Zündel did not “flee” to Canada but emigrated there (from Germany). Rotondi could have easily found this fact even on Wikipedia’s entry dedicated to Ernst Zündel. In fact, it seems unlikely that he did not consult that entry, but as Francesco Bacone used to say: “slander, slander, something will remain.” To fathom the pettiness of Rotondi’s polemics, however, we need to say a few words about Zündel’s life. Ernst Zündel was a talented (and successful) graphic designer who could have comfortably enjoyed the fruits of his profession (even financially), but because of his intellectual generosity, he ended up being persecuted and prosecuted for a good part of his life. In 1984, Sabina Citron, a Jewess who is the founder and spokesman of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, provoked violent demonstrations against him in Canada. As Prof. Faurisson wrote:[6]

“The Canadian postal service, treating Revisionism the way it treats pornography, refused him all service and all right to receive mail. Zündel only recovered his postal rights after a year of judicial procedures. In the meantime, his business has failed. At the instigation of Sabina Citron, the Attorney General of Ontario filed a complaint against Zündel for publishing a ‘false statement, tale or news.’ The charge was based on the following reasoning: the defendant had abused his right to freedom of expression; by distributing the Harwood pamphlet, he was spreading information that he knew was false; in fact, he could not fail to be aware that the ‘genocide of the Jews’ and the ‘gas chambers’ were an established fact.”

Rotondi speaks of boisterous behaviors and “carnival” attire, but we must understand that at the time Zundel was fighting for his life. He survived at least three attacks on his person, including a devastating arson attack against his home. It is true that he paraded with a cross on his shoulders (as you can see in the aforementioned film by Morris), but Rotondi “forgets” to mention a significant detail: on the cross brought by Zündel there was a scroll saying “Freedom of Speech,” the very freedom of speech that Jewish organizations wanted and still want to deny anyone who dares to challenge their power. Zündel’s bodyguards were anything but ridiculous, since every time he entered the court, Zündel risked physical assault. But I am unaware that he ever wore a Jewish camp uniform; there is no trace of it in Morris’s film. As for the two volumes “whose titles alone are indicative” according to Rotondi: the first one on UFOs “was nothing more than popular fiction to build publicity for Samisdat,” as Zündel stated in an interview:

“I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book was for fun. With a picture of the Führer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. […] And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about."

As to the second book, the Italian Wikipedia entry on Zündel states that he denied authorship of that book. It is not easy to be more biased than Wikipedia when it comes to revisionism, but Rotondi evidently succeeded in that.

Let’s go back to Leuchter. Rotondi wrote (p. 69):

“Leuchter’s ‘expert report’ would not suffice to save him [Zündel] from a 9-month prison term, because it was to be rejected by the judges of the Toronto Court for the following reason: He was not any expert (was not competent).”

In a footnote, Rotondi reports: “Official transcript of the Zündel Trial, p. 9052.”

In this regard I contacted Rotondi via Facebook and I asked him to send me a scan of the aforementioned transcript page, but Rotondi evidently believed it was better not to respond. The reason for this may be, because he culled that quote from another source without due verification? In any case, reading Barbara Kulaszka’s book ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ (not to be confused with Harwood’s booklet), which is a meticulous and very extensive documentation of that trial, reality seems to be a little different. As for Fred Leuchter’s testimony, there are three paragraphs that deserve to be quoted in full:[7]

“[Judge] Thomas held that Leuchter could give oral evidence but that the report itself was not going to be filed. (32-9032) He held Leuchter was not a chemist or a toxicologist. (32-9034) He further held that Leuchter was an engineer because he had made himself an engineer in a very limited area. (32-9048)

Thomas stated that Leuchter’s opinion in the report was that there were never any gassings or exterminations carried on in the facilities. He held that Leuchter was not capable of giving that opinion. (32-9049) Nor was he capable of testifying regarding the results of the analysis of the samples. His testimony was restricted to the taking of the samples and who he turned them over to. (32-9047, 9048) Leuchter was allowed to testify with respect to his own work, his observations of the camps and the information he had gathered concerning the facilities, and whether the facilities were feasible as gas chambers. (32-9054) Defence counsel was instructed not to refer to the Leuchter Report during the in-chief examination. Thomas held that Leuchter had no expertise whatsoever in crematories and disallowed any testimony relating to crematories. (32-9052, 9054)

Fred A. Leuchter was qualified as an expert in the design, construction, maintenance and operation of execution gas chambers. He was allowed to give opinion evidence on the operation of gas chambers and the suitability of the facilities he inspected in Poland to operate as gas chambers. (32-9062, 9063)”

“Thomas held that Leuchter had no expertise whatsoever in crematories and disallowed any testimony relating to crematories.” This is the entire sentence that Rotondi speciously truncated in half. Moreover, the same Judge Thomas, although far from being well-disposed toward the defense, recognized that Leuchter had the qualification of an engineer and was expert on gas chambers. And Rotondi cannot claim that he does not know Kulaszka’s book, since he mentions it in a note on page 68!

But that’s not all. As for his qualifications as an engineer, Leuchter specified during the cross-examination conducted by the public prosecutor[8] that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Department of Drug Enforcement had recognized him by issuing two medical licenses, and also “the United States Navy in all of the work he had done with them on navigational instrumentation.”

Continuing with what Rotondi wrote, we find another slander against the American engineer on p. 71 of his section on Leuchter’s credibility:

“Even the simple qualification, which is self-attributed, of being an ‘expert specializing in the design and manufacture of devices for capital punishment,’ above all by means of gas chambers, belongs into the realm of fairy tales.”

We have just seen how Leuchter’s qualification in this regard was recognized by Judge Thomas. But, also during the Toronto trial, there was yet another element that Rotondi hides from his readers: the testimony of Bill M. Armontrout, at that time chief warden at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City:[9]

“Armontrout testified that there was only one consultant in the United States that he knew of in the design, operation, and maintenance of gas chambers. That consultant was Fred Leuchter. (32-8896)”

Even the New York Times recognized Leuchter’s expertise in this regard in a prominent article of October 13, 1990, and in a follow-up article on June 13, 1991 about the settlement between Leuchter and the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, the New York Times wrote, “was once one of the nation’s leading advisers on the administering of capital punishment.” The problem for Leuchter was that, the NYT writer stated right afterwards, that Leuchter “angered Holocaust survivors with articles in which he contended that historians had inflated the number of victims of the Nazis.”[10]

Rotondi, however, insists (p. 71):

“In his Report and later in his testimony during the Zündel Trial, he had declared before the Court that he had worked, by virtue of his skills, as a consultant for Missouri, California and North Carolina. The director of the St. Quentin prison (California), Vasquez, quoted by Leuchter, stated instead that his prison had never had any relationship with him, and Gary T. Dixon, director of the North Carolina prison, argued that his penitentiary had never used Leuchter’s assistance either.”

Let’s start by saying that, in his Report, Leuchter does not name any of the prisons cited by Rotondi. He claims only that he designed hardware in the United States used in the execution of convicts using hydrogen cyanide gas. As for his testimony during the Zündel Trial, Leuchter testified:[11]

“Leuchter testified that he was a consultant to the states of South Carolina and Missouri with respect to the operation of gas chambers used for prisoner executions, and was currently under contract with the state of Missouri to completely reconstruct their gas chamber.”

Kulaszka’s documentation contains neither a trace of Vasquez’s testimony nor of Dixon’s testimony. Rotondi refers in this regard to an entry of the anti-revisionist Nizkor website, which claims to quote the persons in question without, however, giving any sources for it. Rather, it must be kept in mind that at that time the prison wardens with whom Leuchter worked were warned and threatened by Jewish organizations, as Leuchter himself reported:[12]

“I have been vilified both privately and publicly in all forms of the media. My clients have been cajoled and threatened into not dealing with me. […]

At Klarsfeld’s initiative, […] they began to threaten prison wardens with political consequences if they dealt with me.”

Revisionist historian Mark Weber wrote in the same vein:[13]

“The most insidious (and effective) effort has been a behind-the-scenes campaign to destroy his livelihood by pressuring state governments to stop employing him as their execution hardware engineer. To allow Leuchter to continue working for the state, declared Illinois Representative Ellis Levin (D-Chicago), ‘would be an affront to the Jewish community.’ (Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, August 17, 1990.)”

There is no trace of all this in Rotondi’s book. He instead writes (pp. 71f.):

“Leuchter is a strange guy, has a raspy voice and chuckles continuously for no reason, showing his teeth yellowed by nicotine ... He takes selfies without restraint with a noose around his neck and tied up in an electric chair, boasting with contract relationships, expert reports and degrees without worrying the least about being exposed as a liar.”

That sentence is not criticism but real character assassination. And yet, in this case it is Rotondi himself who is not the least worried about being exposed as a liar. Even in this sentence, there is no dearth of lies. Anyone who has watched Errol Morris’s documentary will have noticed that Leuchter’s voice is absolutely normal, and that he does not chuckle continuously for no reason. (I am also unaware whether Leuchter has ever been photographed with the noose around his neck).

Finally, I venture to doubt that Faurisson, in an article for the French weekly Rivarol, spoke of Leuchter as a “genius” (p. 72). Rotondi provides neither the issue nor the page number. Another copied and pasted quote without verification?

Rotondi’s Libels Regurgiated by Prof. Aldo Giannuli

In 2009, Italian scholar Aldo Giannuli published a book titled The Public Abuse of History: How and Why Political Power Falsifies the Past.[14] As we read on the Book’s flaps, Prof. Giannuli is a researcher of contemporary history at the University of Milan.[15] He was a consultant for the prosecutor’s offices in Bari, Milan (on the Piazza Fontana massacre), Pavia, Brescia (on the Piazza della Loggia massacre), Rome and Palermo. From 1994 to 2001, he collaborated with the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres.

Therefore, he is not an “amateur” (as is the self-confessing Rotondi) but a scholar of clear fame. Unfortunately, however, the level of his approach to revisionism (and, in particular, to Leuchter) is identical to that of Rotondi, and indeed, it seems that he took cues from him. In Giannuli’s book, the third chapter, which is dedicated to the (alleged) refutation of revisionism is titled “The Tribunalization of History” (“La tribunalizzazione della storia”). Giannuli deals with the Leuchter Report on pages 115-117, from which I take the following quote (all emphases are mine):

“On examining its merit, this report has been taken apart completely. Moreover, Leuchter admitted not to be an engineer but a graduate in philosophy, that he based his research exclusively on the works of Robert Faurisson, and that the publisher Zündel commissioned and financed his trip to Poland. In short, Leuchter was merely an indisputable crook. In spite of this, his report has nevertheless remained one of the deniers’ basic texts. Leuchter’s affirmations prompted understandable indignation of camp survivors; his false credentials moreover attracted the mass media’s attention, overshadowing the issue of merit. On the other hand, this is in the logic of the mass media: saying that a certain guy is an impostor who boasts to have titles he does not possess takes a headline of two lines, but in order to say that in the gas chambers of Auschwitz five times more people could enter than Leuchter counted, a headline is not enough.”

One single observation is due here: if anyone is a crook and an impostor here, it surely is not Leuchter. Moreover, it is not true that Leuchter based his research exclusively “on the works of Robert Faurisson.” Actually, Leuchter wrote four expert reports in total, and his fourth report is dedicated to a technical evaluation of Jean-Claude Pressac’s magnum opus, Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers.[16]

To conclude, although it certainly is true that a headline does not suffice to elaborate on the problems raised by the (first) Leuchter Report, the three paltry – and pitiful – pages dedicated to it by Giannuli aren’t enough either, just as the other three pages dedicated by Giannuli to revisionism in general (his pages 112-114) are not enough compared to the monumental historiographical and scientific work published in recent years by authors such as Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf.

Rather, one wonders: how come, when it comes to revisionism, even authors like Giannuli (but I also think of Giovanni Fasanella) who are used to “flying high,” end up sinking below sea level?

On Leuchter’s Competence

 

Fred Leuchter is not only an engineer but also an inventor who owns several patents. I found interesting news about him in the article by Mark Weber titled “Fred Leuchter: Courageous Defender of Historical Truth”:[17]

“Since 1965, he has worked as an engineer on projects having to do with electrical, optical, mechanical, navigational and surveying problems. He holds patents in the fields of optics, navigation, encoding, geodetic surveying and surveying instrumentation, including patents on sextants, surveying instruments and optical instrument encoders.

From 1965 through 1970 he was the technical director for a firm in Boston, where he specialized in airborne, opto-electronic, and photographic surveillance equipment. He designed the first low-level, color, stereo-mapping system for use in a helicopter, which has become an airborne standard.

In 1970, he formed an independent consulting firm. During his period with this firm, he designed and built the first electronic sextant and developed a unique, light-weight, compact and inexpensive optical drum sector encoder for use with surveying and measuring instruments. He also built the first electronic sextant for the US Navy. He has worked on and designed astro trackers utilized in the on-board guidance systems of ICBM missiles.

Because of his work in navigational devices he has had hands-on experience with surveying and geodetic measuring equipment and a thorough knowledge of map-reading and cartography. He is trained in reading and interpreting aerial photographs. He designed a computerized transit for surveying use, and several years ago he developed the first low-cost personal telephone monitor.”

Conclusion

Since it was written, the Leuchter Report has been the object of many criticisms: sometimes honest, often dishonest. Of course, it contains some flaws which the revisionists themselves have detected, but being a pioneering work, this was inevitable. What I wanted to point out here, however, is that it is still the work of an expert who had every right to express his dispassionate opinion, a right that Jewish organizations and many societies have tried ruthlessly to infringe upon as a warning to everyone, experts and non-experts alike, who dares to speak out freely and frankly on the greatest taboo of our time.