A philosopher watches Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., directed by Errol Morris.

Someone who worked here [for Errol Morris] once said...that I was not interested in a story unless it contained a first-semester philosophy question. There is definitely some truth to that.

Fred Leuchter designed electric chairs for executions. As word spread, states started asking him to design other execution equipment: lethal injection machines, gas chambers, and gallows. Then, in 1988, Ernst Zündel was put on trial in Canada for denying the Holocaust in print. His defense team needed an expert witness, and they looked to America. Why America? The answer is chilling: the lawyers wanted to prove that the Nazis never gassed anyone, and “America is the only country that dispatches people with gas.”

Still, their choices were limited:

You can’t open up the phone book and say “gas,” then “chamber,” then “experts,” and out come ten Fred Leuchters. No, there’s nobody. Fred Leuchter was our only hope.

Leuchter agreed to investigate Zündel's claims. He flew to Poland and illegally chiseled off pieces of the crematoria walls in Auschwitz. He sent them to a lab and asked that they be tested for the presence of cyanide. (He did not tell the lab where the samples came from.) The tests came back negative. This (among other things) convinced Leuchter that the Holocaust never happened.

Leuchter stuck to this belief even though it was not just false but quite obviously based on faulty and incomplete evidence,¹ and even though it cost him his marriage and his livelihood. Mr. Death is a documentary Errol Morris made about Leuchter, and it is in his signature style: Leuchter speaks for himself for most of the movie, and much of that speech, we watch him deliver.

Take Morris for his word; what, then, is the philosophy question in this film? In one interview he says this:²