Fred Leuchter

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Qvist
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Fred Leuchter

#1

Post by Qvist » 04 Feb 2003, 11:05

I just watched "Mr. Death" last night. I am curious, what is the current standing of the Leuchter Report? Is it still being employed as "serious" evidence by revisionists or holocaust skeptics? For that matter, views on the film itself and the picture it paints?

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Scott Smith
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MR. DEATH...

#2

Post by Scott Smith » 04 Feb 2003, 12:33

I think the Leuchter Report was pathbreaking in its time when the iron curtain was starting to fall and it was claimed the three or four million were gassed there. Leuchter also has some interesting practical observations from the Majdanek and Dachau gaschambers. But the Leuchter Report has long since been superceded by the Rudolf Report, itself inconclusive.

Execution hardware expert Leuchter was commissioned for the benefit of the defense in the Zündel trial (who was charged with Thoughtcrime in Canada) and therefore he went beyond his evidence. Also, they needed to get somebody who actually had a degree in Engineering and not just one in History, or at least was licensed as a professional engineer, if he was going to call himself an engineeer. The questions that Revisionists like Butz, Faurisson, Zündel, Leuchter, Rudolf and others have raised have forced the establishment to develop a technological basis for their exterminationist claims. They are not able to merely dismiss the technical matters as inconsequential or "technically possible because they happened." They have had to struggle to explain how in scientific terms their claims are possible--and not always convincingly.

I read a review of Eroll Morris' film a long time ago and Leuchter said he liked the film, though one senses that it portrays him as an amiable doofus in a bad cause. Morris admitted that he had to reedit it many times because when it screened to Gentile audiences they actually left questioning the Holocaust, something that he obviously never considered possible, with the Holocaust simply as a given from his perspective (or a monolithic-fact, as I would call it).
:)

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Qvist
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#3

Post by Qvist » 04 Feb 2003, 13:26

Hello Scott

Well, as it now stands the film certainly does not give you the feeling that the holocaust never happened. The scenes of Leuchter's excavations in Auschwitz is nicely juxtaposed with sequences of an historian going through the relevant files and drawings. We see Leuchter commenting on the absence of a ventilation system, then the other chap looking at a technical drawing of the ventilation system, reading out the order for it to the producer, signed by SS Major Bischoff and a later report to the effect that the system was now operating. There are moments of revealing and sublime involuntary irony as Leuchter says stuff like "why didn't they just shoot them? That must have been much simpler" (evidently without any clue that that method had been widely practised and in the end discarded exactly on grounds of practicality).

The film does paint Leuchter as something of a simpleton, or rather, he reveals his own curious limitations through his own monologues throughout the film.

What really angered me was David Irving's words. He credits Leuchter with being the one who decisively convinced him in the matter. He then goes on to comment with obvious contempt on Leuchter's personal stature and qualities. He then states that Leuchter's life had been ruined by his participation in the Zundel trial and that he had no idea what he was going up against or the consequences. In this, I believe he is right. But Ernst Zundel and his crowd and David Irving knew very well, they also knew that Leuchter had no clue. They did not warn Leuchter or prepare him for that, and then they speak of him like he is a piece of garbage. What a bunch of assholes - highly skilled ideolgical warriors letting a useful simpleton walk the plank without a morsel of regret afterwards.

cheers

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Re: Fred Leuchter

#4

Post by chalutzim » 04 Feb 2003, 14:36

Qvist wrote:I just watched "Mr. Death" last night. (...)
Qvist, these are links I hope will interest you:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschw ... stry/blue/

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/

Regards.

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#5

Post by Qvist » 04 Feb 2003, 14:51

Thank you very much, Chalutzim. Most interesting.

cheers

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#6

Post by chalutzim » 04 Feb 2003, 14:55

Qvist wrote:Thank you very much, Chalutzim. Most interesting.

cheers
You're very welcome, Qvist! :)

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Roberto
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Re: MR. DEATH...

#7

Post by Roberto » 04 Feb 2003, 15:07

Scott Smith wrote:I think the Leuchter Report was pathbreaking in its time when the iron curtain was starting to fall and it was claimed the three or four million were gassed there.
Yawn. "Pathbreaking" Leuchter got handsomely paid for drawing the mendacious conclusions Mr. Faurisson wanted him to draw, incidentally revealing his sorry ignorance when he stated that it was ""impossible to kill 6 million people in the time interval in which the concentration camps existed", as if anyone had ever claimed this.

As to the supposed claim that "three or four million were gassed" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, that was never endorsed by western historians, as Smith well knows.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster New York, 1960
Page 973
How many hapless innocent people - mostly Jews but including a fairly large number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war - were slaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of ‘2,500,000 victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000’. Later at his own trial in Warsaw he reduced the figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figure at four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was ‘even as high as three quarters of a million.’ He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas chambers, to which he adds ‘the unknown proportion’ of some 300,000 of more ‘missing’, who were shot or died of starvation and disease. By any estimate the figure is considerable.
Emphasis is mine. The figure of 1,135,000 victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, given by Höß at his Warsaw trial, is in line with most posterior estimates by historians:

- Dr Josef Kermisz, from the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, wrote in 1949 that this Commission had evaluated the number of victims of Auschwitz at 1 500 000;

- Gerald Reitlinger in 1953 estimated at 800 000 to 900 000 the number of Jewish victims of Auschwitz;

- Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of European Jews, 1961, estimated the number of Jewish victims of Auschwitz at 1 million and the total number of victims of Auschwitz at 1.1 million.

- Helmut Krausnick declared in 1964, at the process against former members of the Auschwitz staff in Frankfurt, that the total number of victims of Auschwitz was between on million and one and a half million;

- Georges Wellers in 1983 provided an estimate of 1.3 million Jewish victims at Auschwitz and a total of 1.5 million victims of the camp;

- Franciszek Piper, in a study that started in 1980 and the results of which were presented in 1991 and 1994, gave as the total number of victims of Auschwitz a minimum of 1.1 million and a maximum of 1.5 million.
Scott Smith wrote:Leuchter also has some interesting practical observations from the Majdanek and Dachau gaschambers.
Those "practical observations" must be interesting as hell, like the "observations" assessed under

http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/
Scott Smith wrote:But the Leuchter Report has long since been superceded by the Rudolf Report, itself inconclusive.
The same sort of junk, wrapped up a little more cleverly and thoroughly taken apart in a number of online articles that can be read under these links:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschw ... stry/blue/

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschw ... e-science/
Scott Smith wrote:The questions that Revisionists like Butz, Faurisson, Zündel, Leuchter, Rudolf and others have raised have forced the establishment to develop a technological basis for their exterminationist claims.
That's what "Revisionists" would badly like to believe, but the facts are much more prosaic. While some researchers like Pressac, van Pelt and Green have successfully undertaken to meet "Revisionist" charlatans on their own ground and debunk the sorry crap these people produce, most historians still don't care much about the mechanics of given killing devices. Why should they ? Such details are a footnote to historiography, which concerns itself with more important questions.
Scott Smith wrote:They are not able to merely dismiss the technical matters as inconsequential or "technically possible because they happened." They have had to struggle to explain how in scientific terms their claims are possible--and not always convincingly.
As I said, some have rather successfully endeavored to keep the gullible from falling for the "technical arguments" that "Revisionists" lamely take recourse to because they cannot plausibly account otherwise for the fate of millions who disappeared behind the gates of what evidence shows to have been places of mass murder. So successfully that leading proponents of "Revisionist" baloney, like David Irving, have wisely refrained from using stuff like Rudolf's theses in court, lest it be publicly pronounced to be the nonsense that it is. Read about Irving's withdrawal of an affidavit prepared by Rudolf for his Lipstadt lawsuit under

http://www.holocaust-history.org/irving-david/rudolf/

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#8

Post by tonyh » 04 Feb 2003, 16:29

But Ernst Zundel and his crowd and David Irving knew very well, they also knew that Leuchter had no clue.
Why are you giving off about Irving? As far as I know he had absolutely nothing to do with Leuchter's involvement in the Zundel trial. In fact, I don't think Irving himself had anything to do with Zundel until the Zundel trial. Its not as if there was a cabal of people who conspired to get Leuchter in hot water with the holocaust faithful.

Tony

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#9

Post by Qvist » 04 Feb 2003, 17:15

I'm aware that Irving was not involved in the Zundel trial. Still, his comments about Leuchter were IMO distastefully arrogant. That's all.

Zündel however must have known perfectly well what Leuchter probably did not - namely what sort of consequences the enlistment of this naive man would have for his reputation. He knew that for all practical purposes, he was enlisting Leuchter for his own ideological campaign, a campaign for which Leuchter did not appear to me to be at all equipped or prepared. Zündel knew that Leuchter's association with him would likely destroy him, and he did not appear to have much regret for that fact.

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#10

Post by tonyh » 04 Feb 2003, 18:43

How do you know that Ernst Zundel did not warn Leuchter of the people he was dealing with. Your making a lot of assumptions. Your insinuating that Leuchter was deliberately led astray, without any real evidence.

Leuchter wasn't forced into destruction by Zundel, or Irving or any other so called "revisionist" for that matter, but by blacklisting from the opposite school of thought. It wasn't the revisionists who ruined Leuchter by branding him a "holocaust denier".

Tony

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#11

Post by Qvist » 04 Feb 2003, 19:00

tony:

I am simply giving my impressions on the basis of the film. Nothing indicated to me that either Zündel or anybody else tried to make it clear to the obviously naive Leuchter that he was becoming part of a political crusade and what that would entail for him. As far as I'm concerned, if they didn't, they took advantage of another person's naivete and left him stranded in the desert, metaphorically speaking. I don't much respect that. If you wanna have a different opinion, be my guest.

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#12

Post by Roberto » 04 Feb 2003, 19:07

tonyh wrote:Leuchter wasn't forced into destruction by Zundel, or Irving or any other so called "revisionist" for that matter, but by blacklisting from the opposite school of thought.
Do you really consider the propaganda crap that calls itself "Revisionism" a "school of thought", Tony ?

Is the Flat Earth Society also a "school of thought", in your opinion ?

If so, your statement would be more understandable.
tonyh wrote:It wasn't the revisionists who ruined Leuchter by branding him a "holocaust denier".
Two things wrong in the above sentence.

First, the last thing your "Revisionists" are is revisionists.

Second, the term "branding" suggests unjustified labeling, while Mr. Leuchter, if I remember correctly, expressly stated that the mass killing of Jews in gas chambers couldn't have happened. As he ignorantly placed all Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide in the gas chambers, that made him as complete a denier of this genocide as can be found.

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#13

Post by Charles Bunch » 04 Feb 2003, 19:41

tonyh wrote:How do you know that Ernst Zundel did not warn Leuchter of the people he was dealing with. Your making a lot of assumptions. Your insinuating that Leuchter was deliberately led astray, without any real evidence.
The people that Leuchter was dealing with were people ill disposed to permit gross lies about a proven historical event.
Leuchter wasn't forced into destruction by Zundel, or Irving or any other so called "revisionist" for that matter, but by blacklisting from the opposite school of thought. It wasn't the revisionists who ruined Leuchter by branding him a "holocaust denier".
Leuchter's destruction was based on the lies and actions of distortion he committed in service of Zundel. After such a pathetically inept performance in an area for which he claimed expertise, and after other exaggerations about his career as a "execution expert" came to light,
who in there right mind would hire the guy? Leuchter destroyed himself for $30,000.

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#14

Post by Erik » 04 Feb 2003, 21:51

Erik has a couple of “comprehension problems” from some late postings here from two different posters.
Roberto wrote:
tonyh wrote:
It wasn't the revisionists who ruined Leuchter by branding him a "holocaust denier".

Two things wrong in the above sentence.

First, the last thing your "Revisionists" are is revisionists.

Second, the term "branding" suggests unjustified labeling, while Mr. Leuchter, if I remember correctly, expressly stated that the mass killing of Jews in gas chambers couldn't have happened. As he ignorantly placed all Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide in the gas chambers, that made him as complete a denier of this genocide as can be found.


Arguing from ignorance, “that made him as complete a denier of this genocide as can be found”?

A “complete denier” must arguably deny “knowingly”, right?

Then who “suggests unjustified labeling”, unless it is the brander himself?


Mr. Bunch wrote:
tonyh wrote: How do you know that Ernst Zundel did not warn Leuchter of the people he was dealing with. Your making a lot of assumptions. Your insinuating that Leuchter was deliberately led astray, without any real evidence.
The people that Leuchter was dealing with were people ill disposed to permit gross lies about a proven historical event.
Were they “ill disposed”, “disposed” -- or both, anyhow?

Granting that they were “disposed to permit gross lies about a proven historical event” and that Leuchter was “deliberately led astray”, how did they execute their confidence trick? Persuading him that they were out to prove the Holocaust in a “scientific way”?
Leuchter's destruction was based on the lies and actions of distortion he committed in service of Zundel.
The laboratory chemist that analyzed the samples of brick that Leuchter sent him said that he would have arrived at other results if he had known the source of the samples.

If Leuchter had been smart enough, he could have said the same thing – i.e., if he had known the result that the laboratory chemist would arrive at, he would have declined to participate in the “service of Zundel”.

Could he have “washed his hands”, like Pilate?

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#15

Post by Roberto » 04 Feb 2003, 22:01

Erik wrote:Erik has a couple of “comprehension problems” from some late postings here from two different posters.
Roberto wrote:
tonyh wrote:
It wasn't the revisionists who ruined Leuchter by branding him a "holocaust denier".

Two things wrong in the above sentence.

First, the last thing your "Revisionists" are is revisionists.

Second, the term "branding" suggests unjustified labeling, while Mr. Leuchter, if I remember correctly, expressly stated that the mass killing of Jews in gas chambers couldn't have happened. As he ignorantly placed all Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide in the gas chambers, that made him as complete a denier of this genocide as can be found.


Arguing from ignorance, “that made him as complete a denier of this genocide as can be found”?
The ignorance resided in Leuchter's uninformed assumption that the "standard story" had it that six million Jews were gassed at "the concentration camps" or at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
The Leuchter Report:
It Was Impossible to Kill 6 Million People at Auschwitz!


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Judging by the amount and area of the gas chambers, and the number of the Kremas, it was impossible to kill 6 million people in the time interval in which the concentration camps existed.

No-one claims that 6 million people died at Auschwitz. Many died in other death camps, in the ghettos and in occupied Soviet territory. Estimates of the number of people who were gassed to death in Auschwitz vary, but the lowest is 900,000, and the highest about 1,600,000. It is obvious that the extermination and cremation facilities in Auschwitz could take care of such a number.[...]
Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/leu ... aq-08.html

Assuming it was ignorance, that is. "Revisionists" are fond of building themselves the windmills they charge against and "refuting" assertions no one ever made.
Erik wrote:A “complete denier” must arguably deny “knowingly”, right?
A consideration that leads us to an interesting question:

Are people like Freddy and the philosopher consciously lying ?

Or are they mentally unbalanced enough to believe their own BS ?

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