Mr Death

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

Someone who worked for the filmmaker Errol Morris once said that Morris “was not interested in a story unless it contained a first-semester philosophy question.” Morris repeated this comment in an interview, and agreed: “There is definitely some truth to that.”

Among the stories that came to interest Morris was the story of Fred Leuchter. Leuchter designed electric chairs. Since governments also needed lethal injection machines, gallows, and gas chambers, new business opportunities would come his way, and Leuchter would design those machines of death as well.

This expertise in the technical elements of execution set the stage for an ill-advised career turn. In 1988 Ernst Zündel was put on trial in Canada for denying the Holocaust in print—which was a crime north of the border, where the First Amendment of the US Constitution did not reach. Zündel’s defense team wanted an expert witness, who would “prove” that the Nazis never gassed anyone. To find one they looked to America, because only there could experts in gas chambers be found: “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, drove to Auschwitz, entered the crematoria, and illegally chiseled pieces off the walls. After returning home Leuchter sent the pieces to a lab and asked that they be tested for cyanide. The tests came back negative. This (among other things) convinced him that the Holocaust never happened. This conclusion was not just false but quite obviously based on faulty and incomplete evidence. (The chemist who conducted the test later said that the kind of samples Leuchter collected, and the way he handled them, made the result meaningless; Leuchter never looked at the material in the Auschwitz archive; etc.) Leuchter stuck to it anyway, even though it cost him his marriage and his livelihood.

Mr. Death is Errol Morris’s documentary about Leuchter, and it’s in Morris’s signature style. However much Leuchter is to be condemned, Morris eschews harsh interrogations and gotcha questions. Leuchter is mostly allowed to speak for himself, directly into the camera.

Take Morris for his word in the quotation at the top; what, then, is the philosophy question in this film? In one interview Morris says:¹