Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Rating:
Summary: Complex and Engrossing
Review: Like all of Errol Morris's work, there is more here than you first see. Things loop back on themselves, the obvious becomes fuzzy, and you end up with more questions than answers. For about the first 20 minutes, Mr. Leuchter offers chilling details about capital punishment -- the way it is done, the way it goes wrong, how the killing machines are made, and what happens to the human body when it is electrified. This is difficult to watch. There is an unbearable scene in which an elephant is electrified, writhing on the ground in pain, in a test for human electrification.

Leuchter's descriptions are disturbing, with his detached, scientific manner of explaining the mechanics of the devices. But his goal as an engineer is to make electric chairs more humane. There is such innocence about the man, and he is consistent with his stated belief that he is "in favor of capital punishment" but is "not in favor of capital torture." This is how he justifies his work. As his reputation spreads, Leuchter starts getting hired to work on lethal injection machines, then on designing a gallows. Even he admits that this is outside his realm, since his only real area of expertise is electric chairs. However, he takes the jobs on these other killing machines, believing it is all simply engineering. Soon, you can see the humbleness turn to self-worth when Leuchter states that there are no other engineers in the world who know how to do what he does.

Leuchter's reputation soon lands him a job investigating Nazi atrocities in support of a Holocaust denier by the name of Ernst Zündel. Leuchter is hired to take samples of bricks and mortar (illegally) from Poland's concentration camps. Zündel is on trial in Canada for Holocaust-denial publications, and he wishes to use Leuchter's findings, and reputation, in his defense. As you watch Leuchter taking the brick and mortar samples, you see a man getting far beyond his league, a feeling compounded by experts who weigh in on the facts of the Holocaust. But Leuchter goes ahead with his "research," publishes conclusions that are scientifically unsound and politically offensive, conclusions that come to the aid of the Holocaust-denying Zündel. Leuchter's name is in the news. This simple man is suddenly known by millions of people around the world. His conclusions eventually contaminate every part of his professional and personal life.

Viewed from the surface, Mr. Leuchter should offend us, yet we feel sorry for him. As one of the interviewees in the movie says, what he is most guilty of is "criminal simplicity." Leuchter moves through the world trusting in simple details and simple conclusions, unable to imagine how these will be interpreted. He lends support to Holocaust denial, but doesn't see what he has done, stating childishly at one point, "I have a lot of Jewish friends." He is truly bewildered by the reactions people have to his work.

The way Leuchter talks about the gas machines the Nazis used is the same way he talks about his own work on death machines. He wonders why the Nazis would go to such trouble gassing people when they could just shoot them all or blow them all up. Leuchter seems unable to understand that the victims of Nazi concentration camps are not the equivalent of people on death row in America. His mind stays on the technical aspects of delivering death efficiently, not on the wrong or right of the matter.

Your feelings sway between pity, as one interviewee puts it, to anger, as when you see Leuchter doing a speech before an audience of Holocaust deniers, calling it a "myth." An average man suddenly thrust upon a stage where people hang on his every word, he gets caught up in his self-worth, as would many people. This makes it more difficult to judge him. Morris does an amazing job of exploring the gray zones of this story. Is Leuchter a bad guy, or was he just manipulated by more sophisticated and crafty people like Zündel?

The story hints at a subtle, but widespread, reaction to the Holocaust. Even people who accept that it happened are unable to get their minds around six million murders, and it is a predictable human response to feel that it "just doesn't make sense," as Leuchter puts it at one point.

The story is also a great investigation into ignorance and how people can latch onto a hypothesis, a proof, and then cease to question themselves. Leuchter never sways from his belief that chiseling hunks of bricks is an effective way to determine whether or not people were gassed by the Nazis. Once he determines that this is a legitimate test, he bases his entire "study" on the results. This ignorance destroys him, just as ignorance destroys a person or a society when left to grow unchecked.

Errol Morris does an excellent job of putting that ignorance on view for us to see and understand.

Rating:
Summary: The Banality of Evil ?
Review: Morris' spellbinding, terrifying film is the portrait of a man who is morally tone-deaf, who is unable to recognize essential differences between good and evil outside of his own little life. The video footage of Leuchter at Birkenau with his chisel, obliviously desecrating the site, almost made me sick to my stomach, as if someone were to take a hammer to the headstone of someone else's parent without permission. That he considered his trip to Auschwitz his honeymoon is a detail that could have come from one of Evelyn Waugh's darkest comic novels. You have to feel sympathy for how his life has been laid to waste by his foolish actions, but you have to ask yourself: what ... was he thinking? In his interviews with Morris, with his constant inappropriate little jokes and remarks about things that are beyond his ken, you realize you are looking at an exemplar of the ultimate moral idiocy of technology without a heart or mature perspective. Leuchter can build anything; he even implies he could make the gas chambers operational again (that is, if they ever existed in the first place). This is Morris' best film, a glimpse into the very heart of darkness.

Rating:
Summary: The Ruin of a Simple Man
Review: Mr. Death - The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Review by Bruce Cantwell

Errol Morris's best documentary to date paints the portrait of the son of a prison guard who went to work with his Dad and came to understand the human relationships between prisoners and guards. Somewhat of a social misfit, he fell into repairing, then designing and manufacturing execution equipment that did its job right the first time with minimal trauma for prisoners, guards, wardens and witnesses.

Leuchter's descriptions of malfunctioning electric chairs and their grisly consequences are morbidly fascinating but the movie really kicks into gear when Leuchter makes the pivotal decision of his life.

Erich Zündel, a German neo-Nazi living in Canada was prosecuted for spreading false news in the pamphlet "Did Six Million Really Die?" Because Leuchter was the closest thing America (maybe the world) has to a gas chamber expert, he was approached by Zündel's defense team to scrutinize the Polish death camps.

Perhaps because he truly believed in the freedom of speech issue on trial or because he was flattered to be considered an expert witness in such an important case, he decided to perform an investigation and issue a report (which found no evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau or Majdanek).

This decision (to perform an investigation to the best of his abilities and present the results) forever changes Leuchter's life and raises an interesting question. are there crimes so unthinkable (denying the Holocaust publicly) that no attempt at a defense can be tolerated?

Leuchter's business is effectively shut down by the protests of Holocaust activists until, out of desperation, he turns to the only people who still accept him (neo-Nazi groups) to present his report not as a champion of their cause but because what he believes to be true supports their beliefs.

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Rating:
Summary: another unique vision from Errol Morris
Review: Mr. Morris has once again introduced us to a person without whom the world would be just too plain. Lechter adds his persona to a long list of people that Errol Morris has exposed from the darkest pits of this country. Through Lechter we are introduced to a man who didn't want to play footbal when he was little, who didn't want to dig holes in the sand, or be a bullie but to someone that would rather hang with his dad in the jail that he worked in. This exposed Lechter to a world that not many of us have a chance to see. Like the lady in Stairway to Heaven, who dedicated her life to create a humane way of slaughtering cows, Lechter improved the tactics and the utilities that the death sentences are carried out. Starting with the electric chair, the lethal injection machine, and the hanging process. Lechter's description of his work is very serious and detailed. In parts it's funny as well esp. when he talks about his invention of the pan to be put under the electric chair so that way the executed's excrement and other bodily fluids would not spill all over the floor. this he mentions would prevent the guards not to get any urine on them. the second half of the documentary did not interest me much. Lechter's involvement in the nazi financed research to prove that the Holocaust never existed was dull and a downfall for Lechter. he should've never anticipated in such research. some comments are just too rediculous and kind of ruin that certain amount of respect built from the earlier part. still by the end of the film you are left with the image of a man whose existence didn't touch any lives ar improve any for that matter. but that's the beauty of it. it's a must for Morris fans and of the macabre.

Rating:
Summary: beautifully done, but doesn't go deep enough.
Review: Purely on artistic merit I would award this film an 11 on a scale of ten. Most documentaries dream of achieving this kind of artistic impression. As for its command of the subject it struggles too hard to be passive. In many ways that passivity is charming because it gives a chance to show what sort of person the real Fred Leuchter is but in turn it glances over the holocaust denial issue.

The portrait of Fred A. Leuchter that comes through is a gullible and misguided man who strive to his utmost to achieve acceptance from his peers. His rabid desire for acceptance is made clear by the fact that he himself pronounces his last name as if it were "Loocher" but Ernst Zundel pronounces it "Loikter" in the German sense. When it comes down to the video Leuchter made for Zundel we find him adopting Zundel's pronunciation of his own name. In the end Leuchter succumbs to the siren song of the holocaust deniers who bestow upon him all the respect and admiration of any university professor. One feels almost sorry for such a man when his highly unpopular views ends up costing him what little success he had achieved. I don't personally believe Fred Leuchter actually means to be the spokesperson of holocaust denial but he finds it too difficult to give up the position he has achieved through that.

At one point when he is asked if he could reconsider his views on the holocaust his only reply is, "No, I'm beyond that now". The one thing this video portrays is the man who is virtually lost in the muddle of holocaust deniers and their opponents; the former manipulate him and the latter villify him. Leuchter is really just a mediocre and unfortunate man who has been thoroughly exploited by people who really don't care about him as anything more than a way to further their own racist agenda.

To get more aquainted with the real issues behind the Leuchter report I would recommend "Truth Prevails: Demolishing Holocaust Denial : The End of the Leuchter Report" by Shelly Shapiro which is a collection of articles on the Leuchter report written by several of the interviewees in this film among others.

Rating:
Summary: Have a Nice Execution!
Review: The first knowledge I had of Fred Leuchter came from an article in 'The Atlantic Monthly' some years ago. I pictured Leuchter as a tall Boris Karloff sort of man, so I was disappointed to see that 'Mr Death' looked more like 'Mr Rogers'.

Errol Morris's film opens with Leuchter sitting in the Faraday cage at the Boston Museum of Science while bolts of static discharge from the van de Graff generators strike all around him. Errol's conceit of course is to recall the controversy that Leuchter's activities have attracted to him. What the Faraday cage represents, I don't know; Leuchter's stupidity and stubborness perhaps?

Leuchter seems to be very good at designing execution equipment, but little else. He wants to make sure that convicts who are executed do not suffer pain. His stories of botched executions do not cause him to question the justice of the death penalty but only impel him to build better equipment and write better protocols.

His failure to find cyanide in the samples he took from Auschwitz and other death camps is simply and reasonably dismissed by the director of the lab that did the testing. So why does Leuchter stick to his conclusions rather than trying to do a better test; or why don't his opponents refute him on that basis? I don't know, and the film doesn't explain.

At the end of this film, Leuchter remains an engima. He comes across as a socially inept man who doesn't understand why so many people are angry at him. And his refusal to recant his assertions in the face of criticism sounds like simple pigheadedness.

The film is mostly talking-heads, mainly Leuchter's, with documentary footage such as Morris has done before. David Irving, who recently lost a libel case against a reporter who called him a Holocaust-denier, puts in an appearance. I was hoping for a score by Philip Glass, but sadly this film has a different composer whose music doesn't have the driving force that Glass brought to 'The Thin Blue Line'. The DVD has no extra materials.

Rating:
Summary: Nice story, too much cinematography
Review: There's a good story in "Mr. Death", but it's sometimes overshadowed by the moviemaking. The opening shot is a beautifully photographed montage of Fred Leuchter (or an actor?) being raised up in a metal cage in a lightning chamber. The photography is amazing and the metaphor is interesting (Leuchter worked on electric chair technology), but it made me wonder how exactly the imagery told the story.

There are other similar scenes. When Fred talks about his coffee and nicotine addiction, there is are lingering slow-motion shots of coffee being poured, coffee being consumed, reflections in a coffee mug. The effects are pretty, but pointless; a single, slightly interesting fact about Fred is stretched into a too-long display of flashy cinematography. The same goes for slow-mo shots of brick and concrete samples being crushed, walls being chipped, and the like.

Several scenes are apparently re-enactments by actors, but it's never made clear until you read the closing credits and see that there was a cast for re-enactment. Was the lightning scene real? Were the slow-mo shots of someone in the Auschwitz basement real? Who knows, and what's the point anyway?

The story is interesting, but the substantive material would have fit into 30 minutes. At 80 minutes, "Mr. Death" has a lot of flashy fluff.

Rating:
Summary: Truth is so difficult but tolerance is uppermost
Review: This film is fascinating because it shows how science and engineering can be misled when the scientist or the engineer gets down into the real field of his research or work. Criteria that are clear and clear-cut in books, become fuzzy in reality. Fuzzy ans entertwined. Mr Leuchter made a mistake in Auschwitz because he neglected one element : cyanide deposits can only penetrate concrete and bricks as deep as a few microns. He picked big samples and the result of the analysis deluted the deposit. But it is not enough to prove him wrong when he says that he did not find any cyanide deposits in those samples, hence that those rooms he visited were not used as gaschambers. We must also take into account the deluting of these deposits over time and in connection with the exposition to natural elements. We should also take into account the difference in penetration according to the material (concrete versus bricks, etc). But this film shows how practicality is dangerous in the field of science. It is not enough to be practical, that is to believe what we can see and touch, to be true, to reach truth. Thruth is beyond practicality. But at the same time, there is no absolute and foreverlasting truth. Truth changes with time and new discoveries, new approaches can change what we believe. Though we do not see how we can negate the Holocaust, the millions of victims, historians must go on working on the evaluation of the event to understand the meaning of it, and also to refine the knowledge of the facts. Mr Leuchter got trapped in practical knowledge and lost track of the truth. But he is more naive than criminal. We must also consider that if he came to his conclusion, some others are going to come to the same conclusion. So we should work hard on disentangling facts, exploring evidence in order to make sure the fundamental core of the truth about such events will not be forgotten or neglected and the fundamental core is that so many millions of people died there, actually were killed. The number of people actually gassed and those dying of exhaustion or being fired or beaten to death is not the core of the truth. It is that six million people actually died there, even if they did not all die in gaschambers, just as they were not all cremated. The horror of this event is so powerful that we at times forget to discuss the data and to go on collecting data. This film also shows somewhere that when you support the death penalty, you may become so friendly with the death of others that you may minimise death in general. Death has to be a natural event and not an artificial or man-made event because in the second case some people may cultivate the desire, that will seem natural to them, to inflict death onto other people. Finally I find unacceptable that a man may be victimized by the whole society or by some people who have some power in this society because he says something that may be wrong, or even that is wrong for us who do not even make the effort to discuss with him and convince him of his mistake. We then make the same mistake as he does : we want truth to be absolute whereas it is necessarily fuzzy and entertwined.

Rating:
Summary: The death of a documentary
Review: This movie was originally much different than it turned out to be, that is, as seen in this DVD version. The first version was too balanced, too even-handed, and audiences came away thinking that maybe Fred Leuchter was right. Director Morris then made dramatic alterations to cast Leuchter -- and by extension, his ideas -- in a bad light. Reading the other reviews of this DVD, you can see that Morris' smear attempt was only partially successful.

Rating:
Summary: A Weird & Subtle Commentary on Freedom of Speech
Review: What a peculiar and compelling documentary! Throughout the first part of this movie, Leuchter talks about his improvements upon various execution devices, and not with a little pride. He *says* he designs these things because the older devices are inhumane, that the electric chairs, for example, "cook" people, torture them, and that he wants to make executions as painless and quick as possible...and, you know, I believe him. He comes off as weird, but sincere.

His underground notoriety as an execution expert motivates holocaust revisionist "historian" Ernst Zündel to hire him to prove to a judge and jury that Nazis did not, in fact, exterminate Jews. So Leuchter goes to Auschwitz and--illegally--gathers samples from the "alleged" gas chambers, crematoriums, and so on. He smuggles these samples back to Canada, and a lab determines that they contain no traces of cyanide gas. Based on this--and this alone, apparently--Leuchter (an engineer, but by no means a research scientist) concludes that the gas chambers were never used to gas inmates, and that the holocaust did not happen.

Leuchter's evidence is easily refuted. It isn't the filmmaker's purpose to prove him wrong, and the refutation is quickly and easily accomplished without belaboring it. What is perhaps most interesting about this film is the manner in which it portrays Leuchter: He comes off as something of a stooge, a naive and terribly misguided participant in perhaps the most politically incorrect of all historical revisionism. As a result of this, he is mercilessly persecuted by people who will not tolerate the existence--let alone promulgation--of opposing points of view. Disagreement is decried as "hate," and in our current social environment, once you have successfully identified someone as a hatemonger, it's open season on him, In this sense, the film becomes a critical examination of a freedom we Americans claim to hold dear: the freedom of expression. It is a freedom that comes with a price, and that is that unpopular, often wacky, ideas will be promulgated by people we may not like. The fact is, though, that Leuchter is not an anti-semite. Morris does not show a man with an ounce of hatred in him, or malice, and so far as we can tell, there is no ideology behind Leuchter's belief that the holocaust did not occur. That Morris manages to show Leuchter in a reasonably sympathetic light forces us to examine the alactrity with which we so often attack and attempt to destroy the speaker of unpopular ideas, when perhaps all we really ought to do is attack the ideas that are being spoken. What makes us uncomfortable as viewers, I think, is that we feel sympathy for this guy. Clearly, he is the victim, more than the persecutor.