The Fate of Jews in German Hands

An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism

by Joel S. A. Hayward

Chapter IV:
The Leuchter Affair

In April 1988, the tour de force of Holocaust revisionism was completed, in the form of a forensic examination of the buildings at Auschwitz (some in ruins) now designated as gas chambers. The examination was conducted by an American engineer who specializes in the design and fabrication of execution hardware for the American penitentiary system.

Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston University in 1964, and commenced post-graduate studies in celestial navigation mechanics at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts. From 1965 to 1970, he worked as Technical Director for a Boston company specializing in aerial photographic equipment. In this capacity, he designed the first low-level, colour stereomapping system for use in helicopters. Leuchter's system has since become standard equipment for helicopter aerial mapping. He formed an independent consultancy firm in 1970, and branched out to work on a variety of projects, including the design of astrotrackers utilized in the on-board guidance systems of intercontinental ballistic missiles. As a result of such work, he now holds patents in the fields of optics, navigation, encoding, geodetic surveying and surveying instrumentation including patents on electronic sextants and optical instrument encoders. From around 1980, Fred Leuchter also worked as an engineering consultant to several state governments on scientific equipment used to execute convicted criminals, including hardware for execution by lethal injection, electrocution, hanging and gassing. One of his major projects was the design of a new gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. In 1987, he formed Fred A. Leuchter Associates, an engineering consultancy firm specializing in the design and fabrication of execution equipment, including gas chambers utilising HCN (Hydrocyanic acid, marketed by the Germans, before and during the Second World War, as Zyklon-B).[1]

In February 1988, Leuchter was contacted by Robert Faurisson on behalf of Ernst Zündel, a German-born Canadian on trial for spreading false news [2] by publishing a Canadian version of Richard Harwood's flawed Holocaust Revisionist booklet, Did Six Million Really Die?.[3] Zündel had been previously tried on the same charge in 1985 and sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment. However, in January 1987, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the judgement and ordered a re-trial, which commenced on January 18, 1988.

Zündel had been searching for an American expert in gas chamber technology with experience in the execution of condemned persons by means of HCN, the same type of gas allegedly used by the Nazis to murder millions of Jews. It was his belief that no Jews were gassed in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, and that only an expert in execution hardware could determine whether the alleged gas chambers were capable of having been used as claimed in Holocaust literature. Zündel's defence team wrote to those penitentiaries in the United States that execute prisoners by gassing, requesting the name of an engineer who specializes in gas chamber executions by HCN. Leuchter's name was forwarded to Zündel by Bill M. Armontrout, Warden of the Missouri State Penitentiary, who wrote that Mr Leuchter is an engineer specializing in gas chambers and executions. He is well versed in all area's.[4]

Robert Faurisson, who is a personal friend of Zündel, met Leuchter in Boston on February 4 and 5, 1988, and a few days later asked him if he would be prepared to travel to Poland to conduct the first forensic examination of the rooms now designated as gas chambers at Auschwitz I, Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and Majdanek. Leuchter — who was not, previous to Faurisson's request, aware of Revisionist arguments — accepted the assignment after a weekend in Toronto [with Zündel and his team] reviewing wartime aerial photographs of the camps, plans of the crematoriums and alleged gas chambers, documents on Zyklon-B and slides taken of the sites in the 1970s by the Swedish researcher Ditlieb Felderer. [5] On February 25, 1988, Leuchter left for Poland with a small team of assistants.

The procedures utilized by Leuchter in his forensic examination of the chambers were as follows:

1. A general background study of such material as Auschwitz guide books and maps, copies of some of the original German blueprints for facilities at Auschwitz, Du Pont Chemical Company publications. The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, and selected Holocaust Revisionist works.[6]

2. An on-site inspection and forensic examination (not sanctioned by the Auschwitz authorities) of the chambers in Krema (crematory building) I at Auschwitz I (the Stammlager) and in Krema II, III, IV and V at K.L. Birkenau, and of the chambers at Majdanek. Measurements, construction information and other physical data were recorded during this inspection. Thirty one forensic samples were taken from within the chambers in Krema I, Auschwitz and in Kremas II, III, IV and V at Birkenau. No samples were taken at Majdanek. One control sample was removed from delousing facility no. 1 at Birkenau. These samples were pieces of brick and mortar chiselled by Leuchter from roofs, walls and floors.

All samples (9 kg in total) were returned to the United States for chemical analysis at an independent laboratory (Alpha Analytical Laboratories) instructed to determine the levels of any iron and cyanide traces. The laboratory remained totally unaware of the origin of the samples or the nature of the investigation.

3. A consideration of logistical data and logistical problems regarding the crematories and chambers.

4. A compilation of the acquired data.

5. An analysis of all acquired information and a comparison of this information with known and proven design, procedural and logistical information and requirements for the design, fabrication and operation of actual gas chambers and crematories.

6. A consideration of the results of the chemical analysis of the thirty two forensic samples.

7. Formation of conclusions based on all the acquired evidence.[7]

Upon his return to the United States, Leuchter published An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland [8], incorporating numerous maps, plans, chemical analysis tables and graphs in its 192 pages. His findings clearly run contrary to accepted historical opinion. He ended his report with these words:

After reviewing all the material and inspecting all of the sites at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, your author finds the evidence as overwhelming. There were no execution gas chambers at any of these locations. It is the best engineering opinion of this author that the alleged gas chambers at the inspected sites could not have then been, or now, be utilized [sic] or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers. [9]

Leuchter's unorthodox conclusions, which at first sight seem incredible, do appear to be supported by ample evidence. The first sample taken from delousing facility no. I (BW 5a, Sector B 1a), where HCN is known to have been used to delouse clothing, showed a cyanide content of 1050 mg/kg. However, the samples taken from the chamber in Krema II, Birkenau — where cyanide is claimed to have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and others [10] — showed up as negative; that is, they showed absolutely no traces of cyanide. Very minute traces of cyanide were detected in samples from the chambers in Kremas I, III, IV and V, yet the average cyanide content of these samples was only 2.8 mg/kg. The heaviest cyanide concentration for any one sample was 7.8 mg/kg (less than 0.08% of that taken from the delousing facility).[11] The conditions at areas from which these samples were taken were very similar to those at the delousing facility from where the control sample was taken; cold, dark and wet. Only Kremas IV and V differed in that they were exposed to sunlight, which may hasten the destruction of cyanide. On these independently-obtained laboratory results, Leuchter wrote:

One would have expected higher cyanide detection in the samples taken from the alleged gas chambers (because of the greater amount of gas allegedly utilized there) than that found in the control sample. Since the contrary is true, one must conclude that these facilities were not execution gas chambers, when coupled with all the other evidence gained on inspection.[12]

To explain the minute traces of cyanide found in some of the chambers, Leuchter asserts that the small quantities detected would indicate that at some point these buildings were dc-loused with Zyklon B — as were all the buildings at these facilities. [13] This, of course, is plausible. It is well known by historians of this period that Zyklon-B was a widely-used insecticide developed by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH [14] (DEGESCH) and used by the German army since 1924. During the Second World War, the Germans used Zyklon-B on most fronts to disinfest barracks, clothing and personal effects.[15]

Leuchter's conclusion that the investigated rooms were never gas chambers used to execute humans is further supported by a comparison of the physical data Leuchter compiled at the facilities with known and proven requirements for the construction and operation of actual gas chamber[s]. Gas chambers, explained Leuchter, should be operated at a negative pressure to ensure that any leak would be inward. HCN is an extremely lethal gas, and any outward leak would prove fatal to those operating the chamber or working in the immediate area. Therefore, all doors and windows must be gasketed or sealed with a rubberized or pitched canvas and sealed with neoprene or tar. All surfaces within a gas chamber must be sealed to render the exposed, porous surfaces imperious to impregnation by the gas. Failure to have these surfaces sealed will result in a deadly build-up of cyanide on the walls, making the chamber extremely dangerous to enter.[16]

A gas chamber must also have means for removing poisonous gas/air mixture and replacing it with clean air. This is usually done by an exhaust fan and duct of sufficient size to remove completely all traces of the gas. This may take several hours and involve several complete air changes. The gas exhaust duct must be connected to a chimney stack which vents the gas to a safe distance above the facility where air currents can disperse the gas. This is usually 12.2 metres above the facility, but should be more if the structure is sheltered from the wind.[17] A room or chamber fumigated with HCN that does not have such an exhaust system, but has numerous vents and windows which can be opened, must be aired for at least twenty one hours before it can be safely entered. Where there are few vents, airing can take several days.[18]

As HCN has a boiling point of 25.7°C (78.3°F) at 760mm Hg, [19] a gas chamber should have at least this temperature inside, otherwise the HCN will take far longer to evaporate from its inert carrier, usually wood pulp or diatomaceous earth. Whilst the gas will evaporate at lower temperature, the duration for the gas to evaporate and become lethal will be considerably longer. All modern gas chambers that utilize HCN have heating systems to sufficiently aid the evaporation process. Also, due to the highly explosive nature of HCN, all lighting and electrical hardware must be explosion-proof.

During his on-site examination of the chambers, Leuchter noticed numerous details which made it clear to him that they were never used for gassing people. Because these details vary from one chamber to another, each facility will be dealt with individually.

Krema I at Auschwitz (BW 11). According to the official Auschwitz guide books Leuchter read, this building remains physically in the same condition as it was on liberation day, January 27, 1945.[20] Leuchter found four roof vents in this chamber, none of which had gaskets or could be sealed. These vents stand less than 0.6 metres above the surface of the roof and are constructed of new wood, which indicated to him that they were very recent additions.[21] These four roof vents were the only venting system in the facility. Leuchter found no evidence of an exhaust system ever operating here, and concluded that if HCN gas was vented via the four roof vents, the gas would undoubtedly have reached the hospital a short distance across the road, with patients and support personnel being killed. [22] He also noted that in this chamber there were two floor drains, each measuring 0.305 metres x 0.228 metres, which connected directly into the main camp drain and sewer system. Thus, gas could have leaked into other buildings via this drainage system.[23]

Despite the fact that the chamber was located within the same building as the crematory (less than five metres away), Leuchter found that no gasketed doors existed to prevent gas reaching the crematory, and concluded that an explosion would have occurred.[24] Also, the lighting in the facility was not, and is not now, explosion-proof.

Leuchter claimed that assuming a 9 sq. ft. area per person to allow for gas circulation, which is nevertheless very light, a maximum of 94 persons could fit into this room at one time. It has been reported, however, that this room could hold up to 600 persons. [25] Further, if this facility was used as an execution gas chamber, wrote Leuchter, ventilation would take at least twenty hours and tests must be made to determine if the chamber is safe. It is doubtful whether the gas would clear in a week without an exhaust system. This is clearly at variance with the chamber's alleged usage of several gassings per day. [26]

Kremas II and III at Birkenau (BW 30 and BW 30a). Leuchter's study of the ruins of the chambers at these Kremas resulted in the following information. Kremas II and III were mirror image installations situated at the south-western corner of the concentration camp at Birkenau. Each facility consisted of several morgues and a crematory of fifteen retorts each. The morgues were at semi-basement level and the crematories on the ground floor. A small elevator of 2.1 metres x 1.35 metres in each facility was utilized for corpse transport from the morgues to the crematories. Obviously these elevators could only hold a small number of cadavers at a time.[27]

Leuchter noted that in the corpse cellars (Leichenkeller I) of Kremas II and III — the alleged gas chambers — there were no heating systems or ventilation systems [28], no sealant inside or out, and no doors existing on the chamber in Krema II to prevent gas travelling to the crematory less than five metres away.[29] This, he wrote, would have resulted in an explosion. Due to the more collapsed state of Krema III, he could not determine whether the alleged gas chamber ever had doors. The chamber in each of Kremas II and III:

had an area of 2,500 sq. ft.. This would accommodate 278 people based on the 9 square foot theory. If the chamber was filled with the required HCN gas (0.25lbs/1000cu. ft) and assuming a ceiling height of eight feet and 20,000 cubic feet of space, then 5lbs. of Zyklon B gas would be required. Again, assume at least 1 week to vent (as at Krema 1). This ventilation time is again doubtful, but will serve to compute our numbers.[30]

Further, Leuchter correctly stated that reports of hollow gas-carrying columns are not true. All the columns are solid, reinforced concrete exactly as indicated in the captured German plans. [31]

[p. 213]

Kremas IV and V (BW 30b and BW 30c). These buildings, also at Birkenau, were mirror-image installations consisting of crematories of two furnaces with four retorts each and several rooms utilized as mortuaries, offices and storage. It was in these rooms, positioned slightly differently in each facility, that tens of thousands of people are claimed to have been murdered by gassing with HCN. Leuchter immediately noted that the floor and foundations had never been sealed to render them impervious to gas impregnation.[32] Aside from being able to take physical samples, Leuchter was unable to ascertain much about these buildings and their alleged usage as gas chambers due to the fact that they were razed in late 1944. Nevertheless, after examining both the ruins and the original German blueprints, Leuchter concluded that these facilities were never execution gas chambers. His computed statistics for the chambers in Kremas IV and V were as follows —

Krema IV: 1875 square feet; will hold only 209 people. The 15,000 cubic feet would require 3.75 pounds of Zyklon-B at 0.25 pounds per 1000 cubic feet.

Krema V: 5125 square feet; will hold only 570 people. The 41,000 cubic feet would require 10.25 pounds of Zyklon-B at 0.25 pounds per 1000 cubic feet The ventilation time for each building would be one week.[33]

Majdanek. It is stated that several gas chambers were operating at the Majdanek (Lublin) concentration camp, and that these chambers claimed the lives of a large number of people. There has been disagreement, however, over how many people actually died in this camp. Hilberg states that tens of thousands died in Majdanek, by both gassings and shootings [34], whilst Dawidowicz alleges that the death toll at Majdanek was 1,380,000 people, most of whom were Jews.[35] Gerald Reitlinger is more circumspect, giving no clear figure but stating that Majdanek was not a death factory on Auschwitz lines. [36]

At the Majdanek camp Leuchter examined a reconstructed crematory and gas chamber. The only portions of the building which existed prior to its reconstruction are the cremation ovens. The basic structure appeared to be built of wood, as are all the other buildings at Majdanek, with the exception of the experimental chambers (see below). Leuchter revealed, however, that this building is actually constructed of reinforced concrete, totally inconsistent with the remaining portions of the camp.[37] If this building was reconstructed according to the original specifications, Leuchter claimed, both the present building and the original building must be considered inoperable for the alleged purpose of gassing humans. There were no exhaust fans or stack, no air circulatory systems and no means of containing the gas and preventing it from exploding on contact with the ovens only metres away. This building, he concluded, was nothing more than a crematory with several morgues. [38]

The next building Leuchter examined at Majdanek was Bad u. Desinfektion I (Bath and Disinfection Building no. 1), which contained a shower area, a delousing and storage room and the alleged experimental gas chambers, which utilized HCN and/or CO (carbon monoxide). The delousing room had an area of 74.87 square metres, was constructed with stuccoed walls, and had two ungasketed roof vents. Whilst a poorly constructed air circulation system was present in this room, there were no exhaust fans or stacks. Opening the roof vents, Leuchter insisted, is the only way this room could have been aired, and this process would have taken at least one week. [39] The room was not sealed to prevent gas penetrating into the construction materials (two of the walls were simply wooden partitioning, which would be totally unsuitable for repeated exposure to heavy concentrations of gas) and the doors were not gasketed. In conclusion, Leuchter stated that It would appear from [the] design that this was a delousing room or room for deloused materials … if this were utilized as a presumed execution chamber, it would hold 90 people, at most, and require 2.0lbs of Zyklon B gas. [40]

[p. 215]

The alleged experimental gas chambers were situated in a brick building connected by a wooden structure to the main facility at Bath and Disinfection Building no. 1. There were two chambers, one of 44.59 square metres (chamber 1) and one of 19.41 square metres (chamber 2). There was also a control booth, which had two steel cylinder[s] with pipes running into each chamber. The control booth had an open window of 150mm x 250mm which, according to Leuchter, never had provision for glass or gasketing. This open 'hole' was barred vertically and horizontally with reinforcing rods and opened into chamber no. 2.[41]

Chamber no. 1 had piping running into it from the cylinders in the control booth. This piping was allegedly used to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into the chamber, and terminated in gas ports at two comers of the room. This chamber also had a heater/circulation system but had absolutely no provision for exhausting the poisonous gas, except via the main door. The walls were of stucco and the roof and floor are of poured concrete, none of which had been sealed. Leuchter believed that whilst this chamber is operational for carbon monoxide, it is poorly vented and not operational for HCN. [42] Chamber no. 2, he argued, could not have been used to kill humans either by HCN or CO. The piping into this chamber from the control booth was never completed, there were no exhaust fans and stacks, no roof vents, and the walls, floors and ceilings were not sealed. Thus, Chamber #2 is incomplete and probably never used. [43]

Although he appears to contradict the above-mentioned arguments of Friedrich P. Berg (which are considerably more scholarly), Leuchter was also skeptical of the claim that these two chambers — or any such chambers — were constructed to murder large numbers of people with carbon monoxide:

CO is a relatively poor execution gas in that it takes much too long to effect death, perhaps as long as thirty minutes, and if poorly circulated, longer. In order to utilize CO, a quantity of 4,000 ppm [parts per million] would be required, making it necessary to pressurize the chamber at approximately 2.5 atmospheres with CO … The author would submit that in a chamber filled to capacity with persons occupying 9 square feet or less (the minimum area required to enable gas circulation around the occupants), the occupants would die of suffocation due to their own exhaustion of the available air, well before the additional gas would take effect. Thus, simply closing the executees in this confined space would obviate the need of either CO or CO₂ from an external source.[44]

[p. 216]

During Leuchter's examination of the buildings at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, he paid special attention to the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings. It was his opinion that because the water in Poland had (and still has) a high iron content, the concrete, brick and mortar used in the buildings' construction would also be high in iron. Leuchter was well aware that when HCN conies into contact with the iron in these construction materials, it immediately forms a new compound, ferro-ferri-cyanide: a very stable iron-cyanide compound which is particularly difficult to destroy.[45] If such contact occurred, the new compound would appear as a vivid blue pigment on the surfaces of these materials. This pigment is commonly referred to as 'Prussian blue'.

Leuchter first noticed the presence of ferro-ferri-cyanide at the Auschwitz delousing facilities, where HCN is known to have been used to kill lice. The inner surfaces of these small delousing chambers were stained blue, showing that HCN had indeed been used in these facilities. Ferro-ferri-cyanide staining, however, was not present in any of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau, indicating to Leuchter that these rooms were never subjected to repeated HCN gassings or delousings. This is consistent with the chemical analysis results of the forensic samples taken from these chambers, which only showed minute traces of cyanide. One must admit that the absence of ferro-ferri-cyanide staining appears, at least superficially, to support the view that no repeated mass gassings of humans occurred in these buildings.

At Majdanek, Leuchter discovered blue ferro-ferri-cyanide staining in what he calls the delousing room at Bath and Disinfection Building no. 1, and in experimental gas chamber no. 1 in the same facility.[46] Whilst evidence of ferric-ferro-cyanide is to be expected in a delousing room, the presence of blue staining in the experimental gas chamber is unusual, especially as this room, according to Leuchter, was not a homicide gas chamber. The presence of the staining supports the received opinion that gas was used in this chamber to kill humans. The possibility does exist, nonetheless, that the blue ferro-ferri-cyanide staining resulted from the facilities being deloused on several occasions, or from HCN being used in experiment killing exercises.

Possibly the least persuasive portion of Leuchter's report is his analysis of the crematories of the three camps examined, and their outputs. He may be competent in the rather narrow engineering field of gas chamber design and fabrication, and, as such, his conclusions regarding the alleged gas chambers at these camps should not be dismissed out of hand. Leuchter, however, is not an expert on human cremation, and has never designed, constructed or repaired crematories in his career as an engineer. Nonetheless, he provided a little evidence in support of his claims regarding cremation technology. This evidence took the form of modern crematory specifications, produced by Industrial Equipment and Engineering Co., of Orlando, Florida.[47] Leuchter, despite his lack of expertise in this area, presented a concise analysis of the development of crematory technology, and a comparison of modern crematory ovens with the ovens utilized in the three camps he examined. He pointed out that a modern crematory, of all-steel construction and lined with high-quality refractory ceramics, burns at a temperature of 2000°F or over and will cremate one corpse in 1.25 hours. Even in such crematories, he continued, high temperatures are not sustained for long periods and Factory recommendations for normal operation and sustained use allows for three or less cremations per day. [48] The crematories utilized at the Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, were of a cruder mode of operation (operating without afterburners at an average temperature of approximately 1400°F) and were constructed of brick and mortar and lined with a refractory brick. None of the retorts were designed for multiple corpse incineration, and, according to Leuchter, these crematories usually took 3.5 to 4 hours for each corpse. [49] Theoretically, this would mean a maximum of 6.8 corpses could be incinerated in each retort in a single day (twenty four hours), excluding cleaning and maintenance time.[50]

[p. 218]

Finally, almost all of Leuchter's investigation of the crematories and alleged gas chambers was recorded in still photographs and on videotape by a cinematographer, Jürgen Neumann. A careful examination of this video recording reveals that Leuchter's sample taking followed, with some careless exceptions, a basic pattern;

1. The physical extraction of samples by hammer and chisel.
2. The individual sealing of all samples in plastic bags.
3. The identification of the bag's contents.
4. The numbering of the sealed sample bags.
5. The measurement and recording of exactly where in the facilities each sample was extracted from.

Thus, to summarize Leuchter's conclusions, the laboratory analysis of forensic samples showed that delousing facility no. 1 at Birkenau was repeatedly exposed to HCN, whereas the very minute traces of cyanide detected in samples taken from the alleged gas chambers suggest that these rooms were not repeatedly exposed to HCN. The presence of ferro-ferri-cyanide stoning on the inside and outside of the delousing facilities, and the total absence of this staining in the chambers — with the conspicuous exception of one chamber at Majdanek — appear to support the evidence provided by the laboratory analysis of physical samples. The construction of the chambers further showed Leuchter that they were never used as genocide gas chambers. None of these rooms had adequate means of raising the internal temperature to the required level, or of exhausting the poisonous gas/air mixture, except, in some cases, through small roof vents. Ventilation through these vents would have taken a minimum of two days and may, depending on the temperature, have taken up to one week. Although five of the chambers were housed in crematory buildings, they were not provided with adequately-sealed doors [51], vents or — in the case of Majdanek — windows, to prevent gas exploding on contact with the ovens. None of the chambers had sealed surfaces to prevent dangerous gas impregnation and build-up, and none had explosion-proof lighting and wiring. At Auschwitz, a large floor drain would have allowed gas to enter other facilities. Further, even if these rooms were execution gas chambers, the numbers killed in them could only be a small fraction of the numbers allegedly killed in them. Finally, the crematories could not possibly have burnt bodies at anything close to the speed claimed for them, and certainly not for prolonged periods. Leuchter's examination of the crematories and chambers, and the removal of physical samples from them, was documented on video tape and in still photographs.

The scope of Leuchter's report was intentionally [to] report, focusing only on the chambers and crematories at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. No attempt was made by Leuchter to challenge the view that many hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies and others suffered terribly in these camps, a fact upon which almost all Revisionists agree. Further, no attempt was made to deny that Jews suffered persecution in all areas under German control. Leuchter made no mention of brutality and beatings, of forced labour, of cruel medical experiments or of death at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen. His only claim (although one with obvious implications) was that, whatever else happened to Jews during the Second World War, they were not gassed at Auschwitz, Birkenau or Majdanek.

Leuchter's report is probably the most damaging volley ever fired at accepted opinion on the Holocaust. It has, through its concise elucidation of the mechanics of gassing, highlighted numerous inaccuracies contained within certain textbooks on the subject. The report has also exposed many lapses, errors, fabrications and distortions within the accounts of Rudolf Höß, Miklos Nyiszli and several other attestants to mass gassings. A number of these flaws are major, and seriously diminish the sources' overall reliability and credibility. The incautious use of these accounts by historians who have failed to apply to them the methodological principles used to analyse other types of evidence has also become manifest.

Be that as it may, several of Leuchter's assertions and arguments appear to the present writer to be insufficiently supported by evidence. First, even if the morgue in Krema I was a homicidal gas chamber in which HCN was repeatedly utilized, it is to be expected that only low concentrations of cyanide would be found in samples taken from within this chamber, as it was converted to an air raid shelter in July/August, 1943.[52] Accepted historical opinion is that Krema I was only used as a homicidal gas chamber in 1941 and 1942 [53] and that it was never used to gas more than tens of thousands of humans, compared to the 750,000 allegedly gassed in Kremas II and III at Birkenau.

Second, Leuchter's figures for how many persons could be gassed at a time in each facility are based on his assertion that for enough gas to circulate around each person to be fatal, an area of nine square feet (0.83 m²) per person is necessary. This may indeed be the ideal theoretical person/area ratio, yet Leuchter had no way of confirming that mass deaths could not be achieved in a gas chamber with a ratio of, for example, six — or even five — square feet (0.55 m² or 0.46 m²) per person.[54] This is one of Leuchter's weakest arguments, and appears to be unsustainable.

Third, it is entirely possible that the internal temperature of the rooms could have been raised in summer to the required 25.7°C by the body heat of the people contained within. Various sources actually attest to this occurring. The War Refugee Board Report of 1944, by way of illustration, claims that after the gas chambers at Birkenau had been filled, but before the gas was introduced, there was a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level. This process may even have been aided by heat generated by the cremations ovens and transferred through the walls. That notwithstanding, one must agree that it is extremely unlikely — if not impossible — that these sources of heat would have been sufficient by themselves to raise the internal temperature to the required level in winter (when gassings are said to have still been routinely conducted), when temperatures often plummeted to -20° or -30°C.[55]

Finally, Leuchter's assertion that any gas reaching the ovens would cause a major explosion is clearly not supported by the chemical data sheets supplied by him as appendices in his report.[56] The flammability limits of HCN in air are from 6% to 41% of volume.[57] This means that HCN will explode on contact with a spark of flame if the HCN concentration in the air totals more than 72 g/m³ (grams per cubic meter) and less than 492 g/m³.[58] Document NI-9912 informs us that, during the Second World War, the Germans used HCN in a concentration of 8-10 g/m³ for fumigation purposes.[59] This concentration of 8-10 g/m³ is clearly well under the 72 g/m³ lower flammability level. Even if human executions were carried out with an HCN concentration three, four, or even five times greater than that utilized for fumigation [60], there was absolutely no danger of an explosion occurring. Leuchter, supposedly an expert on gas chamber technology, should not have made such an obvious error.

The present writer concedes that his knowledge of chemistry, toxicology and engineering is limited, preventing him from attempting a proper scientific critique of Leuchter's technical report. His criticisms of the report, if valid, diminish the force of Leuchter's arguments but fail to negate his principal conclusion that there were no homicidal gas chambers at the inspected sites in Poland. Leuchter's arguments, which in general appear to be argued thoughtfully and dispassionately, would need to be refuted by a suitably-qualified engineer or chemist. Leuchter has himself, to his credit, called for an international team of structural engineers, chemical engineers and toxicologists to travel to Poland to conduct a thorough investigation of the alleged gas chambers and to issue a scientific report on their findings.[61] He believes their findings would be consistent with his own, which he realizes is only the first word on the matter. To date, no such international commission or team of scholars has attempted a refutation of Leuchter's report, although an inconclusive analysis of the gas chambers at Auschwitz was conducted in 1990 by the toxicological department of the Instytut Ekspertyz Sadowych (Medico-Legal Institute) in Krakow.[62]

On April 20 and 21, 1988, Leuchter appeared in the Toronto District Court as a science witness in the second trial of Ernst Zündel. Leuchter had prepared his lengthy report for use at this trial and had intended it to be entered into evidence as an exhibit. The Counsel for the Crown opposed the acceptance of his report as evidence, disputing his engineering expertise. He argued that Leuchter had absolutely no experience in crematory design or maintenance. Leuchter was not a chemist or toxicologist he continued, and was only qualified, if at all, to discuss his taking of samples. The following section from the actual trial transcript, dealing with Leuchter's credentials, is revealing:

Q. What formal education do you have in physics?

A. I've had physics on the college [university] level.

Q. All right. Do you consider yourself a physicist?

A. I do not.

Leuchter admitted that he had no formal education in toxicology:

Q. Have you done any university level work in toxicology?

A. No, I have not.

Q. Do you consider yourself a toxicologist?

A. I do not. [63]

Nonetheless, Leuchter declared that, despite his university degree being a Bachelor of Arts, he had studied both physics and chemistry at university, and had also studied there the standard algebra courses, geometry, trig and standard mathematics courses. [64] He also refuted the suggestion that he was not qualified to write engineering reports:

Q. Are you a professional engineer?

A. I am. I have been functioning as such for the last twenty-four years. [65]

Leuchter asserted that his university education, which included mathematics, physics and chemistry, and (more importantly) his decades of experience in the field of engineering, qualified him as an engineer:

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree and I have the required background training, both on the college level and in the field, to perform my function as an engineer.

Q. Who determines that? You?

A. The State of Massachusetts and the United States Governors made that determination when they issued me my medical license. [66]

[p. 223]

Judge Thomas ruled that Leuchter's report would not be entered into evidence, but that he could testify as a witness within the narrow [engineering] area that he's qualified to comment upon. [67] Regarding this decision, an angry Leuchter later stated:

The unfortunate part of it is that the Court did not properly handle the District Attorney [Leuchter meant Crown Prosecutor, John Pearson] and the manner in which he did the questioning. The report itself was not admitted into the evidence but all of the material in the report was gotten into the evidence by virtue of the fact that I had to testify. The unfortunate part of it was the District Attorney was given a copy of my report several days before I was to testify. He examined the report. He made a list of questions and then he asked the judge not to allow the report. Now, the judge denied the report going in as an exhibit but, again, did allow me to testify. But the problem is that he allowed the District Attorney to question me from the report, which was totally unfair from Mr Zündel's standpoint, because what was happening here is that he wasn't allowed to get the full weight of the report in, in terms of the document, but he allowed the opposition to question him [sic] from that same platform.[68]

Leuchter testified at length and in considerable detail about his trip to Poland and his investigation of the facilities in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. His manner was open and sincere, his language precise and scientific: Nonetheless, he was vigorously cross-examined on almost every major point he made and, on several occasions, he conceded that there could be alternative views which were equally valid. For example:

Q. So this stuff you told us about people on the roof who dropped the gas down and how they would be committing suicide, it would take a matter of minutes before the gas got to them, wouldn't it?

A. Unquestionably.

Q. So, if they closed the vent and got off the roof, there would be nothing to concern them, would there?

A. If they got off the roof. But at some point they have to do an inspection to determine whether the parties are deceased.

Q. They send in the Sonderkornrnandos to do that, sir, and they don't care what happens to them.

A. Right, alright.

Q. So, if someone's on the roof with a gas mask, you agree that they've got all kinds of time to get off the roof after they've closed the vent?

A. Perhaps [69]

[p. 224]

Also present at the trial was a British historian, David Irving, who testified as an expert witness for the defence, Irving had previously adhered to the view that the Nazis did attempt the extermination of all European Jews.[70] Yet on April 22, 1988 he conceded that Leuchter's report was a convincing document which had done much, in the previous few days, to reshape his views on the Holocaust. Additionally, Irving claimed that as an historian he was embarrassed that he had never thought of submitting the chambers to a rigorous scientific examination.[71]

Leuchter's testimony at Zündel's trial was hailed as a major success by Revisionists.[72] Robert Faurisson wrote, in his foreword to The Leuchter Report:

In the courtroom, the atmosphere was one of extreme tension. I was sitting beside a number of Revisionist experts, including Dr William Lindsey, chief research chemist for Dupont Corporation before his retirement in 1985. Everyone in the courtroom, regardless of their own personal viewpoints on the topic under examination, were [sic] acutely aware, I think, of participating in a historical event. The myth of the gas chambers was ending.[73]

Zündel was found guilty as charged on May 11, 1988, and sentenced to nine months imprisonment. He later lost his second appeal and is presently [July 1991] awaiting the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court. Leuchter's testimony received very little media attention, but his report, published by Samisdat Publishers, Zündel's publishing company, became a Revisionist 'best seller'. According to the proud publisher:

In quick succession it was translated and appeared in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Dutch! Underground editions appeared in Polish and Russia[n], with wide circulation in Soviet-occupied countries. It was later found to have appeared in Swedish and in excerpted form in Japanese.[74]

[p. 225]

To date, the most substantial attempt at specifically refuting the The Leuchter Report is a book published in 1990 by two anti-Nazi organizations, Holocaust Survivors and Friends in pursuit of Justice, based in Albany, New York, and The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, based in Paris.[75] The latter is co-chaired by Mrs. Beate Klarsfeld, the famed Nazi-hunter who made headlines in 1968 by slapping Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the West German Chancellor, in the face to draw attention to his alleged Nazi past. Both organizations have maintained a fiercely anti-Revisionist position since their formation in the late 1970s.

The book published by these organizations to refute The Leuchter Report, entitled Truth Prevails. Demolishing Holocaust Denial: the end of The Leuchter Report, is a particularly subjective attack on Revisionism, Leuchter's report and, in particular, Leuchter himself. In many places the language used is surprisingly hostile. It is also glaringly out of place in a publication designed to expose an opponent's alleged bias. Jean-Claude Pressac's immoderate concluding remarks on Leuchter's report, by way of illustration, include the following lines: The pitiful 'Leuchter Report' was thrown together by pretentious incompetents desiring to impose their results, which are, for the most part, doubtful and without significance. Because it was based on fake knowledge, including fake reasoning … leading to false interpretations, the Leuchter report lands in the cesspool of pretentious human folly. [76]]

Truth Prevails comprises several articles, each written by a different author. The first article, written by Shelly Shapiro, director of Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, argues that Leuchter was not qualified to write engineering reports because he was not actually an engineer. Shapiro pointed out that Leuchter obtained a Bachelor of Arts in history from Boston university which offered three engineering degrees at the time. He has no formal engineering education. He claims to be self taught. [77] She also insisted that Leuchter had less experience with gas chamber technology than he implied in the introduction to his lengthy report. To support her claims, she quoted letters written by the wardens of several penitentiaries, which state that Leuchter has not worked on, or been consulted on, their gas chambers. Lastly, she asserted that as Leuchter is not registered with the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Engineers his engineering expertise is only counterfeit expertise.[78]

[p. 226]

Shapiro was correct in noting that Leuchter is not an engineering graduate. Despite studying physics, mathematics and chemistry at Boston University, Leuchter graduated with an Arts degree.[79] She may even have been correct about the degree of experience Leuchter had with gas chamber technology. Her statements that Leuchter's name did not appear on the required register is also accurate. However, she failed to take into consideration the fact that, up until the time he wrote his report on Auschwitz, he had worked as an engineer, and successfully so, for twenty-four years. Leuchter's scientific background coupled with these decades of 'hands on' engineering experience more than compensate for the lack of a formal engineering qualification. That Leuchter is a competent engineer is evident from the design patents he holds and the work he has done. Further, that he was not listed on the required register is disturbing, but is no basis to dismiss Leuchter as a counterfeit engineer, as Shapiro did. What she omitted to mention is that only around ten percent of all Massachusetts engineers are registered with the Board of Registration.[80] Thus, approximately ninety percent of the engineers in Massachusetts must be classified as counterfeit, if we are to accept Shapiro's reasoning. Shapiro's attempt to discredit Leuchter and prove that he is not an engineer was based on weak arguments, and fails to persuade.

The central section of Truth Prevails comprises two articles by Jean-Claude Pressac, a French pharmacist and student of the Holocaust. His two articles, The Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of 'The Leuchter Report' and Additional Notes. Leuchter's Videotape: A Witness to Fraud, are introduced by Serge Klarsfeld, co chair of the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. Klarsfeld wrote that Pressac had become one of the world's rare research specialists in gas chamber extermination technique and that Pressac's articles are A Scientific Approach to Discredit the Revisionist Denial of the Gas Chambers. [81]

Here one finds a double standard. Both Shapiro and the Klarsfelds discredited the assertions of Leuchter regarding the alleged gas chambers because, they wrote, he was not qualified to make them. They accused him of being a counterfeit engineer and a fraud, on the basis that he did not have a formal engineering qualification nor a university degree in physics, chemistry or toxicology. However, the specialist they chose to refute Leuchter's scientific and engineering claims, using scientific methods, was even less qualified than Leuchter in the relevant scientific and engineering fields. Pressac has a diploma in pharmacology, the branch of medicine which deals with the interaction of drugs with the systems and processes of the body. His studies included elementary chemistry and toxicology. Nonetheless, he is not a chemist or toxicologist, nor has he studied physics or engineering or had practical experience in these fields.[82]

In his first article, Pressac's tone is sardonic and unscholarly. Pointing out several errors in Leuchter's report, he wrote:

These ultimate errors, weighted with the others, definitively land The Leuchter Report in the cesspool of pretentious human folly. The real butt of this joke of a report is Zundel [sic], who is in debt up to his neck thanks to the Polish Campaign and who was doubly duped — by Leuchter who cashed in on botched, shoddy expertise, and by Faurisson who shamelessly exploits the dubious results.[83]

He accused Robert Faurisson of maneuvering Leuchter into falsifying evidence:

Faurisson's intellectual dishonesty and historical deficiencies are manifest in his writings. It was foreseeable that Leuchter's report, manipulated by Faurisson, would be subject to these same defects. Indeed, this proved to be the case.[84]

Additionally, in Pressac's view Leuchter was not just a puppet of Faurisson; he was also a greedy one:

Let judgement be made. If Leuchter accepted this perilous mission behind the iron curtain, his motivation was not to generously defend Faurisson's deleterious truth, but to collect the steep fee he asked of Zündel and which the latter paid him.[85]

[p. 228]

Despite his impassioned and incautious style of writing, which clearly reveals his partisanship, Pressac did attempt to refute several of Leuchter's arguments. Perhaps because of his pharmacological training, which has given him a better working knowledge of chemistry and toxicology than Leuchter, he was able to detect several distortions, inaccuracies and errors of judgement in the latter's report. A close reading of Pressac's two articles reveals, however, that he also made a number of miscalculations and misinterpretations. He even appears to have occasionally let his preconceptions about the gas chambers lead him to an improper consideration of the evidence.

Due to HCN's flammability levels in air, Pressac correctly noted, there would have been almost no chance of the relatively low concentration allegedly used in the gas chambers causing an explosion, as Leuchter claimed there would have been. Even if HCN had leaked from the gas chambers to the crematory ovens, the concentration would have been so low that there was no danger of explosion.[86]

Pressac also challenged Leuchter's assertion that the samples taken from within the alleged gas chambers should have contained, equal, if not higher, concentrations of cyanide residue than that detected in the sample taken from the delousing chamber. Lice, he noted, require an HCN concentration of 5 g/m³ for a period of at least two hours. Maintaining that concentration of 5 g/m³ for six hours will kill all insects. [87] To kill humans, an HCN concentration of only 0.30 g/m³ is necessary and will effect death within five minutes, yet Pressac stated that:

The dose used at Birkenau [to murder humans] was lethal 40-70 times over (12-20 g/m³), which infallibly killed a thousand persons in less than 5 minutes … The HCN was in physical contact with the gas chamber walls for no more than ten minutes a day.[88]

Therefore, the interior surfaces of the homicidal gas chambers would have been exposed to HCN for only ten minutes per day, compared to the constantly-used delousing chambers, which were exposed to the gas for 12 to 18 hours a day.[89] This, he concluded, accounts for the very high cyanide concentration detected in the sample from the delousing chamber and the very low concentrations detected in samples from the execution chambers. If Pressac's analysis is correct, the discrepancy between the detected cyanide levels in the delousing facility and in the alleged gas chambers (the former being far higher) is insufficient evidence to conclude, as Leuchter had, that the latter were not homicidal gas chambers.

[p. 229]

However, Pressac's argument is specious, flawed by several miscalculations and error of judgement. He based his claim that the gas chambers were only exposed to HCN for ten minutes per day on the premise that these facilities had mechanical gas evacuation devices which would remove the poisonous gas/air mixture immediately after each mass execution. As noted above, the evidence for such equipment existing is unreliable at best, and outweighed by the evidence to the contrary. If the chambers had no mechanical gas evacuation systems, and were filled with HCN, the internal surfaces would be exposed to the HCN for days on end (not just for ten minutes per day), with the concentration diminishing slowly during the wiring out time. — His statement that the delousing chambers were exposed to HCN for 12 to 18 hours a day was apparently based on the assumption that the Germans operated them for six hours per load of infested clothing, to kill all insects [90], and for three loads per day. Yet he had no way of confirming that the Germans were so fastidious about killing all insects, and were not simply intent on destroying lice, the principal carrier of typhus. If the destruction of lice was the main activity of the delousing facilities, Pressac's figure of 12 to 18 hours for the chambers' daily exposure to HCN would be reduced by around two-thirds. Additionally, there are no war-time documents or post-war testimonies to support the view that the delousing chambers were each operated constantly for 12 to 18 hours a day. If the extermination of fleas and lice was the purpose of the delousing facilities, they may have only been used for two or three hours per day.

Pressac tried to buttress his argument by claiming that the walls of the delousing chambers were impregnated with hot HCN at 30°C.[91] In the paragraph above, he described how the gas chambers also operated at 30°C but made no mention of the HCN being hot or impregnating the internal surfaces. It is worth noting that 30°C is only 4.3° above the required 25.7°C melting point of HCN. His use of the phrase hot HCN is selectively applied, misleading and inappropriate.

Pressac challenged Leuchter's claim that the minute traces of cyanide detected in samples from the alleged gas chambers prove that they were deloused on at least one or two occasions. Calling this claim one of the most often-used [Revisionist] lies [92], Pressac stated:

[p. 230]

Classified as an insecticide and vermin killer … [Zyklon-B] has no bactericide or germicide properties for use as an antiseptic. Places and things are disinfected with various kinds of antiseptics: solid (lime, lime chlorine), liquid (bleach, cresol), gas (formaldehyde, sulfur anhydride)…But a morgue is not disinfected with an insecticide or vermin killer like hydrocyanic acid, as Faurisson foolishly claims, which would be as much use as a poultice on a wooden leg. Leuchter, who claims to be scientifically trained, whereas Faurisson is not, similarly used this stupidity in his report.[93]

This is entirely wrong. At no point in his report did Leuchter write that the chambers were disinfected or cleaned with an antiseptic. He clearly stated that the small quantities detected would indicate that at some point these buildings were deloused with Zyklon B — as were all the buildings at all these facilities. [94] In his report, there are also references to HCN's ability to disinfest but none to its ability to disinfect.

Pressac also claimed that the cyanide levels in the ruins of Kremas II, III, IV and V at Birkenau would have diminished as a result of constant exposure to sun, rain and continuous water saturation. It was significant, he believed, that the gas chambers of Kremas II and III — at semi-basement level — were regularly inundated with 30cm of water in the summer… The water level reaching 1 meter during the spring thaw. [95] Moreover, the chamber in Krema I, Auschwitz had not been exposed to the elements, which naturally explains why the detected cyanide levels were higher.[96] As noted above, this argument fails to take into consideration the fact that when cyanide (which is volatile) reacts with iron it forms ferro-ferri-cyanide, and that compound is very stable. It is extremely difficult to remove from porous material, and it will not simply leach out in water.

Pointing out that officials of the post-war Auschwitz Museum partially reconstructed these facilities from the piles of bricks and rubble left by the Germans when they dismantled the buildings, Pressac stated that the bricks used for the reconstructions were picked and placed without consideration of their original positions.[97] This mix-up of bricks, he continued, meant that when Leuchter took samples of brick from what he thought were the gas chambers, he may have taken them from bricks that were originally elsewhere. This is perhaps Pressac's strongest argument, and it does much to disqualify the chemical analysis of the Krema IV and V samples as reliable evidence. These samples may not have come from the claimed gas chambers at all, but from adjoining rooms or buildings.

Leuchter had incorrectly identified the rooms in the ruins of Krema IV, insisted Pressac, and had taken his samples from the doctor's room and an undressing room therein, mistaking them for the gas chambers. Leuchter's subsequent plan of the facility, he continued, reflects this incorrect layout in the plan the south gas chamber was omitted and two non-existent walls were depicted near the northern entrance.[98] It would appear from a comparison of Leuchter's drawn plan [99] with the war-time German blueprints [100], that Pressac was correct. Numerous structural differences are evident, and, according to the German plans, Leuchter's samples were taken in rooms that were never gas chambers. This fact and the brick mix-up mentioned above completely rule out the use of the chemical analysis of the Krema IV and V samples as evidence.

Finally, Pressac argued that Leuchter's examination of the rooms at Bath and Disinfection Building no. 1 at Majdanek exposes his historical incompetence. Leuchter had failed to take into consideration the building's interior and exterior modification which must be retraced in order to understand its layout and successive functions. [101] Nonetheless, after writing more than three pages on the building's history, and stating that the CO tanks and piping proved the building's criminology, since carbon monoxide, though fatal to warm-blooded animals (such as humans), is not the least bit useful in delousing [102], Pressac concluded with these startling words:

Areas A, B1 and B2 being used as HCN homicidal gas chambers seems difficult and remains uncertain… By reason of the forgoing information, I think that area A [Leuchter's Chamber 1] could not have functioned in a homicidal manner living [aaargh: using ?] Zyklon-B. In areas B1 [Chamber 2] and B2 [which Leuchter did not investigate] the technique seems possible, but actual utilization is improbable.[103]

Thus, despite accusing Leuchter of historical incompetence, and insisting that CO was used in the building to gas humans, Pressac agreed with him that there were no HCN execution chambers in the building. Further, he conceded that, in his opinion, the other alleged gas chambers in the camp never functioned as such.[104] His reasons for doubting that these buildings were used to gas humans are actually the same as many of Leuchter's reasons for doubting that the buildings he inspected at Auschwitz and Birkenau were ever gas chambers: there were heating difficulties in all of the chambers; in one building there were a number of windows, which would have made gas poisoning impracticable [105]; and in Bath and Disinfection Building no. 1 there were no gas inletting devices or mechanical gas exhaust systems.[106] Yet Pressac's conclusions regarding the existence of certain gas chambers at K.L. Lublin-Majdanek mean little. Very few historians have believed these four or five other gas chambers existed. Pressac can cast doubt on them — thereby appearing to be impartial — without actually having to query at all the existence of the two or three 'genuine' gas chambers that existed in the camp.

Pressac's second article in Truth Prevails, entitled Additional Notes: Leuchter's Videotape: A Witness to Fraud, is essentially a description and analysis of the videotape of Leuchter's examination of the gas chambers. He attempted to show that Leuchter's sample taking contained too many procedural anomalies to be of any value as evidence. In the case of two or three of the samples, Pressac was correct: Leuchter had been extremely careless, to say the least. For example, on page sixty-eight, we read:

Just in front of the camera, bits of rubble were visible here and there amid the stagnant water [in Krema II]. Leuchter bent over, cast about in the water, picked up a brick fragment from near the surface, threw it away and alter plunging his hand into the water, came up with one from the bottom. This fragment, which did not come from the gas chamber's cement floor, was placed still dripping wet into a bag, which Leuchter pocketed (yet again) without marking it. Having spent a good forty years underwater, it is more than predictable that this sample should have no trace of cyanide.

Leuchter should have been more careful with his sample taking. His sloppiness, evident in the video, weakens Revisionists' claims that his analysis of the gas chambers was careful and meticulous.

Pressac's second article unfortunately reveals that his preconceived ideas about the past have led to an improper consideration of evidence. His total unwillingness to question the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers has meant that when he is confronted with an item of contrary evidence that can't be discounted or refuted, he abandons the methodological principles he ordinarily uses to appraise evidence and simply pronounces it fraudulent. When unable to detect genuine errors in Leuchter's sample taking, Pressac resorted to entirely groundless accusations of dishonesty. His comments on Leuchter's extraction of sample four is a good example:

the sample might have been rigged. Leuchter could already have had a harmless piece in his left hand, struck a few blows with the hammer to create the illusion, and then used his declaration of the sample's quality [Beautiful. I have a beautiful piece of the roof!] as a piece of misdirection.[107]

According to Pressac, the members of Leuchter's team were also involved in the fraud:

… the absence of cyanide from this sample can be explained by outside help: Leuchter was walking toward the eastern opening, where an accomplice could have slipped him — or could already have 'planted — a harmless piece of brick (taken from the ground floor). In this case, the temptation to practice deception was too much.[108]

Knowing that the laboratory's sample testing results appear to bear out Leuchter's claims, Pressac alleged that the extraction of almost every sample was rigged in one way or another. Leuchter's methods: manipulation, substitution and trick photography. [109] The present writer and two fellow students have repeatedly studied the videotape and searched for any evidence that Leuchter had acted unprofessionally or dishonestly in the way he extracted physical samples. They conclude that, whilst Leuchter was occasionally sloppy in the sealing and numbering of samples, there is not the slightest evidence that he, his cinematographer or team members rigged the extraction of a single sample. Pressac's accusations of deceit and dishonesty are unscholarly and unethical, severely damaging his credibility and the impact of his other arguments.

To sum up briefly, Pressac's two articles, acerbic in tone, contain several miscalculations and misinterpretations. They also contain some thoughtful and well-constructed arguments, which expose a number of inaccuracies and errors of judgement in Leuchter's report however, due to the fact that he challenged (and not always successfully) only about half of Leuchter's principal arguments, his two articles ultimately fail to refute Leuchter's findings. To give a few examples, Pressac did not challenge Leuchter's assertions that the rooms had insufficient heating to function as HCN gas chambers, that the rooms could not have held anywhere near the claimed capacities, or that the ovens could not cremate humans at anything close to the claimed rate. By exposing the flaws in Leuchter's report, on the other hand, Pressac's work reveals the need for a thorough investigation of the Polish sites by an impartial team of scholars. Only then will a definitive report be completed and the matter resolved.

The next article in Truth Prevails, entitled Leuchter Exposed and Discredited by the Court, is an analysis of Leuchter's appearance as a witness at the second Zündel trial. The author is Arthur Goodman, the Legal Advisor for Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice.[110] His article attempts to demonstrate from the official trial transcript that Leuchter lacks scientific knowledge, contradicted himself and admitted being in error on several occasions. Yet to make Leuchter's import and court testimony look absurd, he joined together portions of the transcript that were separated, often by many pages, in the original transcript. An example of this improper presentation of evidence can be found on page seventy seven:

But he [Leuchter] did cling tenaciously to the claim that he is an engineer.

Q. Are you a professional engineer?

A. I am. I have been functioning as such for the last twenty-four years. (8972)

Q. What degree in engineering do you have?

A. I have a Bachelor of Arts. (9072)

The Court: How do you function as an engineer if you don't have an engineering degree?

The Witness: Well, I would question what an engineering degree is. (8973)

Thus, Goodman pieced together a carefully-selected question and answer from page 8972, from page 9072 and from page 8973, to give the reader the impression that each question and answer was related to the one immediately above, thereby proving that Leuchter had no justification in calling himself an engineer. A simple look at the page numbers involved and an examination of the transcript reveals that this is not the case. In the one hundred pages of transcript (from page 8973 to page 9072) that separates two of these questions, Leuchter had explained at length the extent of his education and engineering experience and how he managed to function successfully as an engineer without having an engineering degree. There are several other such cases of Goodman's improper and misleading presentation of evidence.

Secondly, Goodman formed incorrect conclusions based on his reading of the trial transcript. For example, under the heading Leuchter Exposed as Untruthful, he wrote:

Lastly, we come to the matter of Leuchter's personal credibility. For him to have helped Zundel [sic], he had to be believed. We shall see that he could not have been. Council for the Crown asked Leuchter :

[p. 235]

Q. And that is all based on the assumption that the physical plant presently at that location in Poland is what was there in 1942, '43, '44 and '45? Is that right?

A. That is correct (9018)

That response was the beginning of the end of Leuchter, for he was [later] asked and answered:

Q. All right Well, can we agree on this? That those facilities were in a very different condition when you were there earlier this year than the condition they were in, for instance, in August or September of 1944. Will you go that far?

A. I think that's a fair statement, yes (9230) [111]

Goodman believed that Leuchter's second answer contradicted his first, and that, therefore, he was being untruthful. It appears that Goodman's argument is based on an incautious reading of these sections of transcript, because there is no contradiction between the two. In the first section (page 9018), Leuchter agreed that the buildings he inspected were, in fact, the actual remains of the buildings constructed by the Germans during the Second World War. In the second section (page 9230), he acknowledged that those buildings were in a different condition when he inspected them from the condition they were in during 1944. Thus, there is no contradiction, nor is there evidence of untruthful testimony. In any event, the nature of human cognition is such that small inconsistencies of testimony are inevitable. Especially during rigorous cross-examination, when attorneys deliberately ask questions in such a way as to induce inconsistent replies, all humans are prone to making statements that appear incongruous. This need not be seen as evidence of dishonesty (although, of course, it can be). If it was, then all witnesses at the Zündel trial — both defence and prosecution — must be considered dishonest, because, as the transcript reveals, they all made a number of inconsistent remarks (most of an inconsequential nature).

Whilst providing an interesting glimpse into the court trial of a Holocaust Revisionist, Goodman's article is too partisan and poorly-argued to convince the informed reader that Leuchter was exposed and discredited by the Court. Nonetheless, to someone unfamiliar with the Zündel trial, or who does not have access to the official transcript, his evidence could appear convincing.

The final article in Truth Prevails to challenge the conclusions contained within Leuchter's report is Facts Written in Blood: The Zyklon B Trial of Bruno Tesch, by T. L. Silets. It was his opinion that Holocaust deniers and apologists may try to erase Nazi crimes by chipping away at gas chamber walls, but testimonial evidence given by the perpetrators of these crimes is extremely hard to ignore. [112] Hence, Silets quoted at length portions of the 1946 trial of Bruno Tesch which, he said, prove that HCN was utilized to murder humans en masse.[113]

[p. 236]

Several low-ranking Germans came forward to testify for the Prosecution at the Tesch trial that they had witnessed or taken part in HCN executions. Silets, who had also referred to the confessions of Rudolf Höß and Adolf Eichmann as proof that such gassings occurred, quoted the court testimony of two such witnesses in his article. If one accepts at face value the general reliability of these sources, as many historians do, then one must conclude that Jews and others were gassed to death en masse by the Nazis. However, it was precisely because Revisionists had exposed so many errors and contradictions in such sources that Zündel had commissioned Leuchter to determine whether or not the buildings could have been used to gas humans in the manner stated within the sources. Leuchter concluded that they could not, thereby inferring that the eyewitness statements are fallacious. Thus, Silets's presentation of the testimony of several of these eye-witnesses, to prove that Leuchter's conclusions about the gas chambers were wrong, only creates a futile situation because of the inevitable return of the argument to its starting point.

It has thus been argued that Truth Prevails ultimately fails to be, as its subtitle states, the end of 'The Leuchter Report'. The contributors were unable to demonstrate that Leuchter was not competent to write an engineering report, that he had dishonestly rigged the taking of samples or that he had lied at the Zündel trial. More importantly, they failed to demonstrate that Leuchter had the preconceived opinion that no gas chambers existed and accordingly shaped the evidence to support that preconception. They did, however, correctly point out several miscalculations, procedural anomalies and errors of judgement in Leuchter's report. Although these flaws do not invalidate several of his principal arguments, they do, as noted above, make necessary another complete examination of the sites by a team of impartial scholars.

Another examination of the gas chambers at Auschwitz was conducted by a scientific team after Leuchter had completed his work. Early in 1990, Leuchter and Faurisson made public the existence of a recent scientific report on the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau [114], carried out by the Toxicology Department of the Instytut Ekspertyz Sadowych in Krakow, Poland.[115] The study was conducted on behalf of the Panstwowe Muzeum Oswiecim Brzezinka in response to publications and court cases in Western countries according to which no Zyklon B gas was used to kill people at Auschwitz.[116] Experts from the institute extracted samples of mortar and brick from Kremas I (at Auschwitz I), II, III and V (at Birkenau) and from within Block III delousing rooms in Auschwitz. These samples, together with control samples known to contain no cyanide, were returned to the institute for chemical analysis.

Only one sample from the alleged gas chambers showed any trace of cyanide, but, according to the report, it showed vanishingly small traces of cyanide compounds.[117] This sample, from Krema II, had a cyanide content of only 6 micrograms per 100 grams of plaster, compared to traces detected in seven of the ten samples from the delousing facilities, which ranged from 9 to 147 micrograms per 100 grams of building material.[118] Samples of human hair found at Auschwitz were also submitted for chemical analysis, but no cyanide was detected in them.

The authors of the six page report argued that the structures' exposure to the elements was the cause of the negative chemical analysis results. This appears to be implausible: one of the samples, which contained no traces of cyanide, was taken from within the chamber at Krema I, which was not, and is not now, exposed to the elements. [119] Additionally, the research team did not take physical samples from the exterior walls of delousing chambers at Auschwitz, where blue staining, evidence of cyanide compounds, is visible even today (a very important point to note).[120]

The Polish scientists found, as Leuchter had, significant cyanide traces in the delousing chambers, but only one sample from the alleged gas chambers showed any cyanide, that being a vanishingly small amount. Thus, despite the fact that they dismissed the results because of weathering, the Polish report essentially corroborates Leuchter's findings. As the report only dealt with cyanide levels, no mention was made of whether the rooms could have possibly functioned repeatedly as homicidal gas chambers. Further, the chambers at Majdanek were not tested at all. What is still required is a complete investigation of the sites, taking into consideration all of Leuchter's arguments. Therefore, because of the very narrow scope of the Polish report, and the result[s] themselves, one must concede that Leuchter's findings have not been refuted.

[p. 238]

The Second Leuchter Report

In April 1989 Fred Leuchter returned to Europe, this time commissioned by Ernst Zündel to investigate the alleged gas chambers at the Dachau concentration camp, near Munich in West Germany, at the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz in Austria, and at Hartheim Castle, also near Linz. Included in his team were two well-known Revisionists, Mark Weber and Robert Faurisson. On his return to the United States, Leuchter published his findings (co-authored by Faurisson) as The Second Leuchter Report in The Journal of Historical Review.[121] The purpose of this second report, wrote Leuchter,

is to determine whether the alleged gas chambers at three (3) specific locations, one (1) in Germany and two (2) in Austria, specifically, Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle, respectively, could have operated in any manner resulting in single or multiple gas executions… The purpose also includes estimates of the maximum number of inclusions (persons) who could possibly have fit into these alleged gas chambers, and estimated venting times. This purpose does not include a determination of any numbers of persons who died or were killed by means other than gassing, or as to whether an actual Holocaust occurred.[122]

Leuchter's procedures were essentially the same as those employed for his first report. Once again he studied background material, conducted on-sight inspections and made measurements, extracted physical samples (tile and mortar), had the samples analyzed by an independent laboratory, and formed conclusions based on all acquired evidenced.[123]

Due to the number of tourists present at Dachau, he was unable to remove physical samples for chemical analysis. He chose not to do so at Hartheim Castle, as the chamber had undergone substantial remodeling which would render such a chemical analysis worthless. Four physical samples were taken from within the chamber at Mauthausen and returned to the United States for analysis. This analysis was completed in accordance with the procedures used in the previous chemical analysis of samples taken from the delousing facility at Birkenau and from the chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Of the four Mauthausen samples analyzed, the highest cyanide concentration was 32 mg/kg, indicating to Leuchter that the facility was never used as a homicidal gas chamber. The presence of cyanide residue in such a low concentration showed, he insisted, that this facility was deloused on one or two occasions.[124]

[p. 239]

Leuchter claimed that his on-site examination of the chambers at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle provided him with further evidence that the inspected rooms were never utilized as execution gas chambers. Due to the differences in size, construction materials, claimed killing capacities and logistical problem each facility will be considered separately.

Dachau. This notorious camp was established on March 10, 1933, less than six weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. In the next twelve years, at least 160,000 prisoners passed between the main gates, which bore the deceitful inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Today Dachau is the Nazi concentration camp visited most often by tourists, perhaps due to its close proximity to Munich. Every year hundreds of thousands of tourists are shown the guard towers, the electric fences, the rows of barracks, the crematory and the gas chamber.

Immediately after the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945 the camp was presented to the world as an extermination centre along the lines of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec, already liberated by the Soviets. Dachau, it was claimed, also had homicidal gassing facilities. A report to the United States Congress, dated May 15, 1945, described in detail the gas chamber at Dachau. Because of the importance of this report as an early description of the gas chamber, it might be appropriate at this point to quote the applicable paragraph:

The gas chamber was located in the centre of a large room in the crematory building. It was built of concrete. Its dimensions were about 20 by 20 feet, and the ceiling was some 10 feet in height! In two opposite walls of the chamber were airtight doors through which condemned prisoners could be taken into the chamber for the execution and removed after execution. The supply of gas into the chamber was controlled by means of two valves on one of the outer walls, and beneath the valves was a small glass-covered peephole through which the operator could watch the victims die. The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set in the ceiling. The chamber was of a size sufficient to execute probably a hundred men at one time.[125]

Descriptions of the gas chamber, and its killing method and capacity, feature in almost every United States military report about the camp written in 1945 and 1946. In these reports, which all agree that Zyklon-B was the killing agent, the number of victims of each gassing varies from one hundred [126] or two hundred [127], to five hundred persons at a time.[128] Numerous former internees had come forward to testify that they were eyewitnesses to gassings at Dachau, and their accounts were recorded by the Americans.[129] Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British Chief Prosecutor at the main Nuremberg trial, even described Dachau as one of the many camps where murder was conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and crematories.[130] Yet the claim that Dachau was an extermination camp, constantly made in the first two decades or so after the war, has been quietly dropped by scholars. It is now generally agreed by historians that Dachau was never an extermination camp and that no people were murdered there in gas chambers.[131] A gas chamber is still shown to the many visitors to Dachau, but now it is alleged (without any supporting evidence) that its construction was never finished. A sign in five languages states: GAS CHAMBER — disguised as a 'shower room' — never used as a gas chamber. [132]

The reason for this about-face is obvious. There, is no reliable evidence to support the view that Jews and others were gassed en masse at Nazi concentration camps in Germany or Austria. The American military reports and the testimonies of former internees contain many internal inconsistencies, and are generally lacking in reliability and credibility. Some of their descriptions of atrocities are clearly figments of their authors' imaginations.[133] There are also no reliable or credible affidavits or memoirs written by camp commandants or high-ranking bureaucrats which support the notion that an extermination programme was conducted on German soil.[134]

It would appear that some of the stories of mass gassings at Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Austria originated as atrocity propaganda stories, created by a combination of misinformation and anti-German sentiment. Despite the Nazi evacuation of large numbers of concentration camp internees, when the Allied troops overran Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Theresienstadt and Mauthausen, horrifying scenes of thousands of corpses and humans dying from typhus and starvation were revealed to a shocked world. It is still not clear whether it was bureaucratic incompetence, a breakdown of communications, or a drastic shortage of food and medical supplies (resulting partly from the chaos caused by the Allied bombing of German cities and transportation lines) that brought about the appalling conditions found within the camps. It was probably a combination of all these factors.[135] Whatever it was the immediate causes of death were the various epidemics, including typhus and dysentery, which raged through the camps during the last months of the war. The skeletal figures and piles of cadavers found within the camps, however horrifying, can not be considered evidence of genocide.[136] It was, however, easy to convince the world, already aghast at the horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek, that these corpse-filled western camps were also extermination camps where genocide was carried out.

According to accepted opinion, the gas chamber at Dachau was located within a crematory building, Baracke X, erected in 1942. This building housed a crematory of four retorts, work rooms, numerous very small delousing chambers, a morgue and a shower room. The latter, identified by a sign over the door which reads, Brausebad (shower room), is the alleged gas chamber. This room has an area of 39.66 square metres and a volume of 92.0 cubic metres (the present ceiling height is 2.31 metres). Leuchter found seventeen false shower heads in the ceiling, none of which were capable of being connected to a piping system.[137] The walls, made of tiles, contain eight recessed lighting fixtures which were not, discovered Leuchter, explosion-proof. There were two 0.52 metres x 0.66 metres floor drains in the shower room, connected to the other floor drains in the building. There were two alleged gas inlet dumps, welded open on the outside, which had internal grates measuring 0.4 metres x 0.69 metres. Additionally, the room had two doors with provision for gasketing.[138] Leuchter claimed that the ceiling now present in the chamber is not the German-built original, but is a false, suspended-slab concrete ceiling. As evidence of this modification he noted that the present ceiling height of 2.31 metres is considerably lower than the 3.03 metre ceiling height recorded by United States Congressmen in May 1945.[139] Further, he pointed out that directly above the present ceiling are steam and heating pipes, which cannot be seen in the chamber. Their presence, he wrote, can be confirmed by observing the pipes entering into the shower room area from an off-limits corridor behind the shower room and visible only from a rear window of the building. [140] He argued that these pipes were suspended under the original ceiling and carried water for the showers. This is plausible if the room was, as indicated above the door, a Brausebad.

Regarding the room's usage as a gas chamber, Leuchter asserted that the design of the gas dumps is such that they could never have emptied the HCN pellets into the room. This is because the angle of the dumps is not inclined sufficiently to allow gravity to cause the pellets to fall out into the room.[141] Moreover, even if HCN was used in the room, it would leak through the floor drains into other rooms. The doors were not gas-proof, there was no system for heating or distributing the HCN within the room, and there were no fans, ducts or stacks for exhausting the poisonous gas/air mixture.[142] Finally, if this room was an execution gas chamber, wrote Leuchter, it would have held only forty-seven persons, and would have required at least one week to vent by convection. [143]

Mauthausen. Established in April 1938, shortly after the German/Austrian Anschluß, Mauthausen became one of the most notorious of Nazi concentration camps. As noted above, Mauthausen — like Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Theresienstadt — was not a death camp, even though thousands of internees perished there. Yet along with these other camps, Mauthausen was misrepresented as being an extermination camp like Majdanek, Belzec or Treblinka. The affidavits of numerous former guards and internees, testifying to the existence of a homicidal gas chamber at Mauthausen, were written into the official records of the International Military Tribunal.[144] Additionally, with the obvious exception of Revisionists, almost all historians writing on the Holocaust have accepted that there was homicidal gassing facility at Mauthausen. The claimed killing capacity for the alleged gas chamber varies from thirty persons [145] to two hundred persons at a time [146], with one hundred and twenty persons at a time being the most widely accepted figure.[147] There is also no agreement between sources, and historians, as to which gas was allegedly used. Some sources clearly state that HCN was utilised for the executions [148], others do not specify which gas was used, whilst others assert that CO was the killing agent.[149]

[p. 244]

During his examination of the alleged gas chamber at Mauthausen, Leuchter recorded physical data and took measurements. The room was situated underground, as were the jail, hospital and morgue. The room was also very small, having an area of 14.0 square metres and a volume of 32.95 cubic metres. The ceiling, which had a height of 2.35 metres, held piping and functional shower heads. There were steam pipes on one wall for heating, and in the centre of the floor was a floor drain measuring 0.20 metres x 0.20 metres.[150] There was also an alleged gas inlet vent in one corner of the ceiling, but, according to Leuchter, the purpose of this alleged gas vent cannot be verified since the ground above has been repaved. [151] In this room there were two doors, which had provision for gaskets, but there was no means of exhausting any poisonous gas/air mixture.

Leuchter pointed out that there have been three successive and contradictory explanations about how the gas was introduced into the room.[152] According to the first version, the gas was emitted from the shower heads. This explanation was quietly dropped, an official museum tour guide told Leuchter's team, when it was pointed out that the victims could have simply put their hands over the shower heads, blocking them and preventing the gas entering the room.[153] If we are to believe the second explanation, the gas was introduced through a roof vent and removed again through a[n] opening on the west side of the room. Despite this being the explanation given on a plaque inside the room itself [154], this version has also been quietly dropped in favor of the third, and current, explanation. Gas, according to the current explanation, was introduced into the gas chamber from an adjacent room through a thin, perforated pipe located on the east wall.[155] It is claimed that tills pipe sat in a long groove carved into the cast wall of the room, so that it was not obvious to victims.[156] Leuchter was unable to find this pipe, the groove in the wall, or a hole in the wall for the pipe to travel through.[157] This room, he argued, could not have held five hundred, two hundred or even one hundred persons — the various claimed figures — if used as a gas chamber. It would only have held seventeen persons.[158] In any event, there was no evidence that the room had been anything more than it appeared to be: a functional shower room. It had died [aaargh: been?] tiled, water-resistant (but not gas-proof) doors, heating pipes, working shower heads in the ceiling which were connected to a water piping system, and a water drain in the floor. It was not used as a homicidal gas chamber, concluded Leuchter, nor could it possibly have been:

The installation has no provision to prevent gas leakage, the lighting is not explosion proof, the floor drain would allow leakage into the sewer system and there is no provision for inletting gas or for exhausting the air gas mixture after an execution. Further, there are steam heating pipes [radiator] on the northwest wall of the chamber, which would most likely result in an explosion if hydrogen cyanide gas were deposited in the room… Without an exhaust system, this investigator estimated that it would require at least a week to vent …[159]

Hartheim Castle. With its towers and massive walls, Hartheim Castle dominate[s] the surrounding flat and open countryside. The castle, twenty-seven kilometres from Linz, is today an apartment building with many residents. However, Hartheim Castle, built in 1898 as a mental asylum, was allegedly used at various times during the Second World War as a training centre for SS personnel from the Polish death camps, as an euthanasia centre, and as an execution centre where victims were sent from Dachau and Mauthausen to be executed in its gas chamber.[160]

Regarding Hartheim Castle, Evelyn Le Chêne wrote:

If the Mauthausen gas chamber could not take such large convoys, those of Hartheim were brought into use. It is believed that Hartheim was kept only for euthanasia victims. The overflow from Mauthausen may possibly have come into this category, but it is probably only half the truth. It is not always realized that the gas chambers of Hartheim Castle and Mauthausen were the scenes of the cold-blooded murder of thousands of prisoners-of-war.[161]

[p. 246]

Despite the extensive post-war remodelling of the room purported to have been the gas chamber at Hartheim Castle, Leuchter recorded physical data and took measurements. This room, he found, had an area of 17.83 square metres and a volume of 48.90 cubic metres. The door was no longer original, the walls had been replastered and the floor resurfaced. The single window was original but had no provision for gasketing. Leuchter claimed that:

…this facility would not lend itself for use as a gas execution installation, the walls being too thick for the installation of gassing equipment. Certainly, because- of the construction, any changes would be visible and not easy to conceal. There is no provision for a gas stack for evacuation of the gas air mixture and no way to install one. The window would certainly leak, allowing large volumes of deadly gas to escape … the alleged gas chamber would have held only some 24 persons… Without an exhaust system this room would require at least one week to vent.[162]

Thus, although his investigation of the room at Hartheim Castle was restricted by the extent of remodelling, Leuchter left with the firm belief that this room had never been a homicidal gas chamber.

He also investigated the crematories at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle, and concluded that the four retorts at Dachau, although fired, had experienced very little use.[163] At Mauthausen there was one furnace with a single retort which showed signs of considerable use. This, according to Leuchter, is to be expected in a camp of this size with only two retorts. [164] The other retort mentioned was part of a furnace which no longer exists, although Leuchter did find evidence of its removal. There were no crematories extant at Hartheim Castle. Leuchter did not present any findings based on his investigations of the crematories at these sites, as he did with the crematories at Auschwitz and Birkenau. This is probably because no scholars in recent decades have claimed that the crematories at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle incinerated 'millions' of bodies, as is alleged for the crematories at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek.

[p. 247]

Thus, if Leuchter is correct, the alleged gassing facilities at Dachau and Mauthausen could not possibly have been used as gas chambers. There were heating pipes in both of these small rooms, which would have, argued Leuchter, probably caused HCN gas to explode. There were also large floor drains in these rooms, which would have allowed lethal gas to escape into other rooms. The doors were not gas-proof, there were no functional gas inlet vents, and there were no gas exhaust ducts, fans and stacks. Leuchter concluded that the chambers at Mauthausen and Dachau were actually harmless shower rooms, and pointed to the working shower heads (in Mauthausen), water piping systems, heating pipes, tiled walls, water-resistant doors, and water drains in the floors to support this conclusion. Additionally, the laboratory analysis of the four samples taken from the chamber at Mauthausen showed only minute traces of cyanide residue, indicating that the room had been deloused on one or two occasions but had never been repeatedly exposed to HCN. It was not possible to ascertain much about the chamber at Hartheim Castle, due to the extensive remodelling. However, Leuchter asserted that, as a result of the extremely thick walls, floors and ceilings in the castle, it would have been extremely difficult to equip the room with the necessary devices. These would include a gas inlet system, gas heating and circulation equipment, and a means of exhausting the poisonous gas/air mixture. Further, if this equipment did exist, it would have been very difficult to remove all evidence from the thick and solid walls. Lastly, even if the rooms were gas chambers, despite the above, they could only have held, at most, a small fraction of the numbers allegedly killed in them at a time. They would also have taken a minimum of two days to vent after each execution, making frequent gassings impossible.

Several of these claims by Leuchter may be, in fact, essentially correct. Whereas many historians, including those at the official Dachau Museum, now concede that mass gassings did not occur at Dachau, it is still claimed that the Brausebad in Baracke X is an unfinished or seldomly used homicide gas chamber. Leuchter provided sufficient evidence for one to conclude reasonably that this shower room was not constructed as a gas chamber, nor could it have been used is a gas chamber. His arguments would certain appear stronger if supported by a chemical analysis of the internal surfaces of the room. Yet even without such an analysis it is apparent from the physical data compiled, and a consideration of logistical problems, that this room was never a gas chamber. It further appears that the room has been altered at some stage to give it the appearance of a gas chamber. The gas dumps and the ventilation port were added after the building's construction, and the ceiling may have been lowered. Either the Germans added these features to an ordinary shower room in a prematurely-abandoned or unsuccessful attempt to make it function as a gas chamber, or the American occupation forces altered the room to support their incorrect claims that Dachau was a death camp. Regardless of who made the changes, they were not sufficient, as Leuchter demonstrates, to allow the room to function as a homicidal gas chamber for repeated use.

A few of Leuchter's arguments regarding the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen also appear to be well-constructed and supported by evidence. It may be that the inspected room at Mauthausen was never a gas chamber, but was an ordinary shower room. The present writer, however, would like to see considerably weightier evidence than Leuchter presented before he would form such a conclusion. The problem is that although additional evidence may still come to light, at present the lack of reliable and credible sources on the gas chamber at this camp make it difficult to refute Leuchter's claims. Most known sources — interrogation records and affidavits of former guards and accounts of former internees — are contradictory and flawed by lapses, errors, distortions and fabrications. Historians have correctly tried to explain the internal inconsistencies and obvious contradictions in these sources, but have actually produced a range of theses that are as contradictory and confused as the sources themselves.[165]

Regarding Hartheim Castle, Leuchter's arguments are weak and unpersuasive. That he found no evidence at this site of the required machinery or its removal is no grounds for stating that the machinery never existed there. According to Adam Golebski, a former internee of Mauthausen, he and nineteen other internees were sent to Hartheim Castle in December 1944 and January 1945 to restore the castle to its former appearance.[166] Golebski described how all rooms, including the gas chamber, were reconstructed so that no evidence of their former use could be detected. Further, the interior of the castle has been remodelled on several occasions since the end of the war. Thus, it was highly probable that Leuchter would find no evidence of any gas chamber equipment at Hartheim Castle, even if it did exist there during the war. As the door was not original, he had no way of confirming that a gas-proof door did not exist there. Because of its small size the room was clearly not used for mass murder, but it is entirely possible that the room was — as several sources attest — used infrequently as an euthanasia death house for killing small numbers of mentally ill persons and criminals.

Leuchter's second report, like his first, contains several miscalculations and misinterpretations. For example, he again stated that the HCN would have exploded on contact with nearby heat sources (in these cases, shower and heater pipes). As noted above, the concentration needed to murder humans is far less than HCN's lower flammability level. Leuchter also repeated his unsustainable assertion that an area of nine square feet (0.83 m²) per person would be necessary in these rooms if they were gas chambers. He also down-played the fact that sources (which should, of course, be criticized according to accepted methodological principles) attest to the removal by the Nazis of all evidence of gassing equipment at both Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle. Despite these errors, however, several of his conclusions were based on a proper consideration of the evidence, and his report — by forcing authors to consider new approaches, methodologies and sources — could advance the cause of historical understanding. He has raised serious questions about the claimed gassings at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle, and these questions should not be ignored. An international team of toxicologists, engineers and historians should be assembled to submit the chambers at these-sites to a thorough and impartial investigation and to publish a scientific report containing their findings.

As noted above, Leuchter's second report was published in The Journal of Historical Review, the pre-eminent Revisionist periodical in the English language. In the middle of 1990 a French translation was published in the first issue of Revue d'Histoire Révisionniste [167], and around this time a German translation began to be circulated amongst German Revisionists. Additionally, on October 13, 1990, Leuchter presented his second report to the Tenth International Revisionist Conference, in Washington, D.C.. Therefore, it is noteworthy that The Second Leuchter Report has largely been ignored by those who attacked the first report with such ferocity. Even though the editor of Truth Prevails was aware of the second report, no article in the book was devoted to a discussion or refutation of its contents. In fact, it was briefly mentioned only four times throughout the book. Further, the United States print media, which has produced hundreds of newspaper articles mentioning Leuchter's first report, has almost entirely overlooked the second report.

It is perhaps not surprising that Leuchter's second report has attracted little attention from anti-Revisionists, the historical profession and the media. They simply do not consider the report to be of any real consequence. Whilst it challenges the opinion that the Nazis conducted mass gassings on German soil, very few historians or media pundits now believe that mass extermination in gas chambers occurred outside Poland. Auschwitz and the other death camps in the east, with their bulging gas chambers and smoke-belching crematoria, to quote Lucy Dawidowicz, eclipsed man's visions of hell. Yet the western camps, where genocide as such is not claimed to have been conducted, have long ceased to be a focus of attention. Leuchter's second report, therefore, does not appear to challenge accepted opinion on the Holocaust to the same degree that his first report did.

[p. 250]

The Leuchter Affair

After giving evidence at the second trial of Ernst Zündel in April 1988, Leuchter returned to his home town of Maiden, Massachusetts, believing that his involvement in the Holocaust controversy was over. As he later wrote : I came, I saw, I testified. There were no homicidal gas chambers. Q. E. D. It was over, I thought. [168] A thirty-three page, condensed version of his first report became a Revisionist best-seller, and was translated into several European languages, yet Leuchter himself attracted very little media attention and was able to spend the remaining months of 1988 working at his profession, without incident or controversy.

The Revisionist community maintained contact with Leuchter and in late-1988 he was invited by the Institute for Historical Review to address the Ninth International Revisionist Conference, to be held in February 1989. He accepted the invitation, and on February 21, 1989, delivered a speech entitled The Making of the Leuchter Report to the assembled group of Revisionists. His address was subsequently published in the Summer 1989 issue of the Journal of Historical Review, and as an IHR leaflet entitled Inside the Auschwitz Gas Chambers. Also present at this Revisionist conference was David Irving, who candidly acknowledged that his new Revisionist position on the Holocaust was due to Leuchter's report on the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek:

I wish that all Americans were like Fred Leuchter, who wrote the report on the gas chambers. He has gone through that same process of self-enlightenment that I went through in April last year in Toronto when I listened to his report and then, with a certain amount of scientific background and upbringing, I knew that here literally was concrete evidence — without meaning any kind of pun — in the truest sense of the word. Here's concrete evidence that you can't deny. And I hit myself on the head, thinking why on earth didn't I think of going there and digging out twenty kilograms of Auschwitz and bringing it back and submitting it for testing? [169]

On March 7, 1989, two weeks after the Revisionist conference, Leuchter was interviewed at length by Tom Valentine on Radio Free America's 'Satellite Radio' programme. Valentine ensured that listeners knew where he stood personally on the issues being discussed: I'm… familiar with the Revisionists. I've been watching them for several years now myself, and liming [aaargh: hearing?], and becoming impressed with what they're saying each year. More and more impressed! He carefully steered the interview so that Leuchter not only discussed his report in detail but revealed his own attitudes towards the subject of Holocaust Revisionism. For example, Leuchter described his reaction to Zündel's unusual request that he travel to Poland to carry out an investigation of Nazi gas chambers:

We spent a very long and very busy weekend going over the photographs and the documentation that he had, and he asked if I would be willing to go to Poland and undertake an investigation of the facilities there. I told him that I would. I also explained to him that, up until now, I had no reason to question the Holocaust. Ah, I had some questions that now had been raised by the documentation that he presented to me, but I also told him that, upon my return, if I found that these facilities could have been used as execution gas chambers, I would state so in my report.

When Valentine asked Leuchter how he felt about the results of his investigation, the engineer's reply was particularly forthright:

Well, I think the thing that bothered me most, and the thing I'm most upset about, is the fact that, ah …I have been lied to for the first forty years of my life. I, like you did, and most Americans, went through grammar school, high school and then college, and we were taught about the Holocaust. We were taught about the German gas chambers. And then to find out that they didn't exist, they couldn't have existed. And the thing that's upsetting is that no-one's made any attempt to investigate these.

As mentioned, in April 1989 Leuchter returned to Europe at the request of Ernst Zündel and investigated the facilities at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle. His subsequent report, entitled The Second Leuchter Report, was published over a year later in the Fall 1990 issue of the Journal of Historic[al] Review. Whilst still in Germany, Leuchter addressed a large gathering of German nationalists at Nürnberg and spoke about his two investigations of the gas chambers. The meeting was organized by Udo Walendy, an Editorial Advisor for The Journal of Historical Review and one of Germany's leading Revisionists.

In the middle of 1989 the Anti-Defamation League published a one-sided anti-Revisionist booklet, entitled, Holocaust Revisionism: Reinventing the Big Lie. Leuchter was harshly criticized, and described as a new face in the antisemitic, Revisionist ranks.[170] Whilst it conceded that Leuchter was a professional engineer, the booklet pointed out that his name did not appear in the most recent list of registered, credentialed engineers maintained by the Massachusetts Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors. [171] Additionally, whilst the booklet mentioned that he was the author of The Leuchter Report, the fact that he traveled to Poland and personally examined the facilities was not mentioned, nor were his conclusions discussed or challenged.

In June 1989 David Irving published a British edition of Leuchter's first report, and sent a free copy to every Member of Parliament, and to the heads of the History, Chemistry, Physics and Engineering departments of all British universities. The effects of this action will be described at length in the following chapter, and will only be touched on briefly at this point. So horrified were several Members of Parliament that they passed a motion in the House of Commons condemning long-time Hitler apologist David Irving and the new fascist publication, the Leuchter Report, in which this evil calumny [denial of the Nazi gas chambers] appears. It is apparent that the Members of Parliament who supported the motion had not actually read Leuchter's report, because it contains no statements that are fascist in origin or indicative of a fascist ideology.

Leuchter did not attract only adverse attention. A lengthy article in the February 1990 issue of The Atlantic, entitled Justice: A Matter of Engineering, Capital Punishment as a Technical Problem, was devoted entirely to Leuchter and his unusual profession. The laudatory article, written by Susan Lehman, portrayed Leuchter as a skilled and resourceful engineer who designs and fabricates execution hardware which is both safe for the executers and humane for the executees. Whilst Lehman described Leuchter's profession in depth and provided some personal details, she made no mention of Leuchter's trips to the Nazi concentration camps or his subsequent reports.

On February 26, 1990 Leuchter appeared, with Bradley Smith, the IHR's Media Project Director, as a special guest on WFXT's Jerry Williams Show. This is a prime-time television show with a Boston-area viewing audience estimated at approximately 100,000.[172] Also joining Williams, Leuchter and Smith was Michael Slomich, the director of the local Jewish Defense League. This was probably the first time Revisionists had ever been able to present their views on a major American television programme. Smith, a confident and convincing speaker, discussed a wide range of Holocaust-related topics, including the liberation of Dachau, the International Military Tribunal, the writing of Elie Wiesel, and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. He answered all questions put to him by Williams, who was clearly opposed to Revisionism. Slomich was argumentative and abusive. You guys are Aryan Nations, neo-Nazi garbage! he shouted at Smith and Leuchter at one point. He even threatened to beat up Smith if he interrupted him again. Leuchter was noticeably unwilling to discuss matters outside his area of expertise. He limited himself to discussing, clearly and calmly, his investigation of the Nazi camps, what he discovered there and how he reacted to his findings. He also renewed his call for an international team of engineers and scientists to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation of all alleged Nazi gassing facilities.

The Institute for Historical Review was delighted with Leuchter and Smith's success in articulating Revisionist views on prime-time television. With typical exaggeration it called the event a remarkable breakthrough, a staggering blow against the historical blackout, and a new plateau in the quest to bring the facts before the public eye. [173]

[p. 253]

On May 10, 1990 ABC's Prime Time Live television show aired a profile on Leuchter and his efforts to manufacture humane execution hardware. The short segment on Leuchter, endued [aaargh: entitled?] Dr. Death, was presented by two popular media personalities, Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson. During the segment — which opened with the words Tonight we will meet Fred Leuchter Jr., the country's foremost expert at creating, designing and maintaining execution equipment — the cameras followed Leuchter into several penitentiary 'death houses', where he was shown inspecting his equipment. He was presented in a positive light, as an expert on execution whose aim was to make executions as rapid and painless as possible. (After all, we are talking about human beings here he was quoted as saying). The Prime Time Live profile on Leuchter was watched by tens of millions of viewers across America.[174]

A month earlier — on April 6, 1990 — Bob Currie, the executive producer of the Prime Time Live show, met two Jewish leaders who were very unhappy about the upcoming story on Leuchter. Beate Klarsfeld, the famous 'Nazi hunter' and head of the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, and Shelly Shapiro, director of the Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, attempted to persuade Currie that Leuchter was not a qualified engineer and that he should be given no media attention. He was, they said, a leading Holocaust Revisionist who had written a report on the gas chambers which was replete with error, dishonestly done and of utterly no scientific worth. [175] They provided Currie with a copy of Leuchter's first report, and a copy of the videotape made of his examination of the facilities in Poland. They also gave him two works to study, Deficiencies of The Leuchter Report and Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, both by Jean-Claude Pressac.[176]

Currie explained that he was already aware of Leuchter's Revisionist activities, but believed them to be outside the segment's area of focus, which was on Leuchter's unusual occupation as a manufacturer of execution hardware. Currie also explained to the women that he was not opposed to an open and impartial examination of certain aspects of the Holocaust. Maybe Leuchter's methods are sloppy, he said, referring to allegations by Shapiro that Leuchter had made gross errors in his investigation, but maybe there's a need for further study.[177] Unwilling to bow to any external pressure, ABC's executives decided to air the segment. Dr. Death was broadcast in May — as mentioned — without any discussion of Leuchter's Revisionist activities. A furious Shapiro later claimed that ABC's 'Prime Time Live' perpetrated an even more serious breach of journalistic responsibility and, more to the point, moral responsibility, than did The Atlantic. [178]

Also in May 1990, Leuchter was contacted by the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Engineers, regarding a complaint that he was practicing as an engineer without the required license. The complaint was filed with the Board by Shelly Shapiro, on behalf of the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation and Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice.[179]

There was a subsequent hearing of fact to determine if a complaint should be issued before a magistrate in Maiden District Court, Middlesex County. Leuchter's line of defence was that according to U.S. Census figures he was one of 50,510 engineers in the State of Massachusetts, of which only around five thousand were registered with the Board of Registration. Therefore, approximately ninety percent of Massachusetts engineers were also practicing their profession without a license.[180] Additionally, whilst a resident of Boston, he had not done any engineering work in, or for, the State of Massachusetts.[181]

It is apparent that Leuchter was being discriminated against by these immoderate Jewish groups. They did not file the complaint against Leuchter because they believed he would design or manufacture engineering equipment that would cause harm to one of his clients. They were clearly trying to stop him working at his chosen profession to repay him for denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers. Beate Klarsfeld stated to the media that we had no possibility of suing him for his report so we took this opportunity. Leuchter is a very dangerous man, she said on another occasion, He denies the death of six million people. We are determined not to let him go on with this denial. [182]

The opposition to the television segment and the filing of the complaint were actually not the first actions taken by militant Jewish agencies against Leuchter. In November or December 1988 representatives of various organizations began contacting prison wardens he had previous[ly] worked with, declaring that his engineering skills were deficient, and threatening them with political consequences if they continued dealing with him or his company.[183] Consequently, he lost several contracts, including a contact for supervising the execution of Charles Walker, a convicted murderer.[184] As he later complained :

[p. 255]

My work continued to fall off. More and more wardens were refusing to speak to me or return my calls. Even states where I had major friendships [with penitentiary wardens] had stopped discussions relative to execution equipment.[185]

A formal criminal complaint was issued against Leuchter on September 18, 1990, under Chapter 112 (Section 81t) of Massachusetts General Law. A conviction under this statute is punishable by up to three months imprisonment and/or up to a five hundred dollar fine. Leuchter made several pre-trial court appearances during the remaining months of 1990, and on each occasion large groups of Jews protested with anti-Leuchter placards (many emblazoned with swastikas), chanting Liar… Liar and other more offensive slogans.[186] Leuchter said he was not overly uncomfortable that many of those present to offer him support appeared to be anti-Semitic. He was simply happy to have the support of anyone, regardless of their political views, who believed in freedom of thought and expression.[187] Numerous Revisionists were present on each occasion to express solidarity with Leuchter, as were a few civil libertarians concerned that Leuchter was being persecuted for merely holding and expressing an unpopular view. That, of course, is how Leuchter saw the campaign being waged against him. Following a court appearance on December 11, 1990, Leuchter and his attorney, Kirk Lyons, held an outdoor press conference at the Maiden Government Centre. In a prepared statement read to journalists, supporters and opponents, Leuchter stated:

The reason that I have been brought before the court on this spurious charge of representing myself as being a registered engineer without being registered is because of my report and testimony before, the Canadian court, regarding my findings as to the non-existence of the alleged Nazi homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz complex at Poland…

I stand behind my report. Because certain groups and individuals do not like my findings, these groups and individuals have formed an international cabal to destroy the report. Unable to do this, since the truths contained therein speak for themselves, this international gang of free-speech busters determined to destroy me personally and economically — and that they may already have accomplished. Through a program of threats to innocent people, lies, slander, and libel against myself and my equipment, they have set about to destroy my civil rights and the civil rights of every American alive today. They would and could continue to deprive me and you of our right to free speech, free thought, and our right to make a living…[188]

Two months earlier — in October 1990 — he had given a lecture, entitled Witch Hunt in Boston, at the Tenth International Revisionist Conference in Washington, D.C. His calm and dispassionate speech focused on what he saw as his persecution for expressing an unpopular view. After eloquently comparing the Jewish persecution of himself to the 1660 witchcraft trial of Mary Dyer, Leuchter stated :

[p. 256]

Today, hypocrisy again reigns in Boston. On the eighteenth of September, 1990, some three hundred years after the disgrace of Mary Dyer, the Massachusetts court system, directed this time by something other than the Puritan ethic, prepares again for another consummate disgrace. It has issued Criminal Complaint Number 9050 CTR 3294 against Fred A Leuchter, Jr. and is preparing to try him for practicing as an engineer without being registered. Today's sedition? Maybe I can get the contract to build the gallows.[189]

The campaign against him, he concluded, was destroying his business:

So successful has this personal attack on me been that I have not received any equipment orders for more than a year. I estimate that more than three hundred thousand dollars have been lost to date. The only work I have been able to obtain is that of court expert in various states. If this continues, I will have been effectively put out of business.[190]

Leuchter continued to maintain that he was not politically motivated in any way. He was not even a Revisionist, he said. I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a revisionist and I have no use for Nazis… The report is a scientific document. I am not saying that atrocities did not occur, only that there were no gas chambers. [191] Nonetheless, Revisionists around the world have described him as one of their leading researchers [192], and have offered him support and expressed outrage at the campaign against him. In December 1990 Ernst Zündel published a newsletter about Leuchter's legal battles, in which he scathingly wrote:

[At the December 11, 1990, court appearance] internationally-known 'celebrities', including big-name 'Nazi-hunters', had come from as far away as Paris, France, to teach this quiet man from Maiden a 'lesson' which he and onlookers were meant to remember for the rest of their lives. Busloads of [Jewish] school-children had been driven to witness this spectacle, coming all the way from New York, in some cases. Apparently it was to be impressed upon them how 'their kind' or 'their elders' dealt with people who disagreed with them about an aspect of history.[193]

The IHR Newsletter has devoted numerous articles to the campaign against Leuchter. The first of these was Alien Terrorists Target Leuchter, published in the October 1990 issue. It began with these words:

Fred Leuchter, author of the first expert study of the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek, has become the target of a vicious campaign aimed not merely at destroying his reputation and his livelihood but even at depriving him of his freedom.

It was correctly reported in the IHR Newsletter of January 1991 that Leuchter's business was effectively ruined and that he and his wife, Carolyn, had been reduced to living from their savings. As his legal defence was very costly, the IHR urged supporters to send financial assistance to him via the Patriots' Defense Foundation.[194] Similar appeals appeared in a variety of Revisionist, conservative, libertarian and even Protestant evangelical publications.[195]

Leuchter's Jewish opponents were not concerned that he and his wife were experiencing extreme financial difficulties because of their actions. On the contrary, they seemed delighted. Moreover they were desperate to have the court find Leuchter guilty of illegally practicing as an engineer so that they could demonstrate to the world what a fraud he is. If he is not really an engineer, they could argue, his report on the gas chambers is not an engineering report. Leuchter's opponents repeated stated that they would fight a 'not guilty' verdict and would continue to pursue the case through to the end, because if he is found not guilty of the charges it gives his report more credibility. [196] Suzanne Tabasky of the Maiden Holocaust Commission insisted that if he's found not guilty, we'll go through this all over again in appeal at either the county or state level. [197]

Three years ago, Leuchter complained in February 1991, I never expected to have to defend myself. I never expected to be harassed and illegally brought to court on trumped up charges. All this for telling the truth. [198] He was clearly distressed and outraged by efforts to paint him as a dangerous Nazi. At several press conferences he emphasized that he was neither an anti-Semite nor a neo-Nazi. I am not a Nazi … I am not a Sandinista nor an Iraqi terrorist. I am not a member of any group except the shrinking fraternity of free-thinkers. [199]

On June 11, 1991 the criminal complaint against Leuchter was set aside when he and his attorneys concluded a formal consent agreement with Massachusetts state officials. This removed the threat of a trial, which had been set to commence on 24 June. The agreement stipulated that Leuchter would apply to the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Engineers for certification as a professional engineer. The Board agreed to consider his application with due diligence and without prejudice. Confident that his qualifications and his expertise would gain him certification, Leuchter agreed to refrain from referring to himself as an engineer until the Board reached its decision. Emphasizing that there had been no admission or finding of guilt on his part, he expressed satisfaction at the agreement, whilst Kirk Lyons praised it as a tactical victory.[200] Even though this occurred in June 1991, at the time of writing (February 1993) the matter of Leuchter's certification has not yet been resolved.

Lastly, it is worth noting that whereas things have gone badly for Leuchter since he first challenged received opinion on the Holocaust, his findings have been validated by a number of persons with qualifications that even the Klarsfeld Foundation could not find fault with. For example, in August 1991 a German chemist named Germar Rudolf traveled to Poland and conducted similar chemical tests of the buildings in Auschwitz now designated as gas chambers. Rudolf, highly qualified in solid body chemistry, is presently completing his doctorate. His report, Gutachten über die Bildung und Nachweisbarkeit von Cyanidverbindungen in den Gaskammern von Auschwitz, comprises a fourteen-page introduction and seventy-eight pages of scientific analysis. The tests Rudolf conducted on the buildings in Auschwitz showed no or insignificant traces of cyanide. Rudolf also pointed out that iron-cyanide compounds are very stable and would certainly not be removed by exposure to rain and other environmental factors. He concluded his lengthy report by stating that the buildings in Auschwitz now designated as gas chambers were never exposed to significant concentrations of HCN. They were not, he said, ever used as homicidal gas chambers, nor could they have been.[201] Also in 1992, Walter Lüftl, the president of the 4,000-strong Austrian Chamber of Engineers and the head of a large engineering company in Vienna, described the alleged mass murders of Jews in gas chambers as technically impossible. Lüftl caused a public outcry by publishing a detailed report of more than one hundred pages, entitled The Holocaust: Beliefs and Facts. In the report he stated, for example:

The mass murders with Zyklon-B could not have occurred. They would not only have violated the laws of nature, but the technical and organizational requirements did not exist. As we know from structural considerations, the crematories could not have handled the [alleged] number of victims. Corpses are not flammable matter, so to burn them takes considerable time and energy.[202]

Lüftl, who mentioned the unexplained contradictions in key eyewitness accounts, also insisted that mass gassings with diesel exhausts were an utter impossibility. As a result of protests, he was forced to resign as president of the engineers' organization. Lüftl said he was not a Nazi and publicly condemned Nazi crimes, but maintained that there was a lack of reliable evidence for the alleged gassings.

[p. 259]

Most Jews sincerely believe accepted opinion on the Holocaust and see no reason to doubt it. That many millions of their people were jammed by Nazis into gas chambers and asphyxiated appears to be an indisputable fact which has been well documented by scholars and survivors. One can even visit Auschwitz, they argue, and stand inside an extant gas chamber or see the ruins of several others. They therefore feel distressed and outraged that a doubting Leuchter would enter those rooms — which thousands of Jews seeking understanding visit every year as pilgrims — conduct an 'investigation', and say that no-one was really gassed in them. By chipping away at the walls of the chambers, Leuchter inadvertently 'desecrated' what are considered by many Jews to be the necropolises of their murdered relatives.

Historians, however, aim at throwing light on portions of the human past by the careful and systematic piecing together of evidence. They attempt to consult the widest possible spectrum of primary source material relating to their objects of study. Physical artifacts, although ignored by many historians, occasionally prove to be as significant and valuable as documentary evidence. In the light of the fact that the most appalling crimes in history were purportedly committed in a number of brick and concrete gas chambers during the Second World War, it is appropriate that the physical remains of those buildings have been investigated to determine their evidential value.

Leuchter's report demonstrates that the consideration of physical artifacts is indeed a fruitful exercise. By recording construction information and other physical data about the buildings under discussion, Leuchter provides us with a means of testing the accuracy and reliability of written accounts of what transpired in those buildings during the war. The buildings' dimensions, by way of illustration, allow us to determine with reasonable certainty the number of people that could have been contained inside them at a time. We can then check these against the numbers claimed in the written accounts.

It might have been better if a thorough examination of the buildings' remains had been conducted by a specialist or team of specialists with no direct links to the protagonists on either side of the Holocaust controversy. Leuchter was clearly not a Revisionist when he conducted his examinations. He was a politically-neutral engineer with no 'axe to grind' about the past. Yet his work was commissioned and funded by Ernst Zündel, a well-known Canadian Revisionist. Consequently, Leuchter's findings — apparently based on an impartial consideration of the evidence — will be dismissed out of hand because of that association.

Leuchter's findings should not be dismissed or considered the last word on the matter. Because his findings represent the first significant investigation of the physical remains of those buildings for the specific purpose of determining their evidential value, they should be studied and debated. Leuchter's first report is far more significant than his second report. Through its explanation of the mechanics of gassing and its compilation of construction information and physical data, his first report has highlighted numerous inaccuracies in secondary sources on the Holocaust. It has also exposed many omissions, errors, fabrications and distortions within the accounts of Höß, Nyiszli, Tauber, Bendel, Vrba and several other attestants to mass gassings. A number of these flaws are major, and seriously diminish the sources' overall reliability and credibility. The overwhelming weight of evidence (much of it based on the laws of physics, which do not bend for either Jews or Revisionists) indicates that if gassings did occur they did not occur in the manner described explicitly in these accounts. This, of course, agrees with the theses of Revisionists, who have for decades — as we have seen — insisted that the principal documents cited as evidence of mass gassings are almost worthless as sources of historical evidence.

This does not mean — as Revisionists insist — that Leuchter has proved that no gassings occurred at all. Leuchter's work is clearly the first word on the physical remains of the buildings, and is therefore not to be ignored or dismissed out of hand, but it need not be considered the final word. Before his findings can be considered definitive they would have to be analyzed rigorously and tested by suitably qualified engineers and chemists with no connection to protagonists on either side of the Holocaust debate. This is all the more important because of the small number of miscalculations and misinterpretations evident in Leuchter's work. An international team of specialists should be commissioned to conduct a full and absolutely impartial scientific investigation of the buildings' remains for the purpose of establishing once and for all whether they were or were not used (or even could have been used) to murder several million humans. The reports of the Krakow institute, Germar Rudolf and Walter Lüftl indicate that the findings of such a team of specialists, if ever commissioned, would tend to validate Leuchter's own findings.

Notes:

[1] Biographical details provided by Mark Weber in his introduction to Leuchter's lecture, The Second Leuchter Report, presented at the 10th International Revisionist Conference, Washington, D. C., October 13, 1990 (IHR Audiotape #A100). The accuracy of these biographical details was confirmed by Leuchter in a letter to the present writer, dated July 24, 1992.

[2] Zündel was charged under Section 177 of the Canadian Criminal Code which provides that everyone who willfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable act and is liable to imprisonment for two years. (31 C.C.C. (3d), p. 97) See above, p. 74, n. 131

[3] See above, p. 70ff.

[4] Letter from Armontrout to Zündel's solicitor, Barbara Kulaszka, January 13, 1988. Reproduced in Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth. An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, 132 page edition (Toronto: Samisdat, 1988), p. 34.

[5] Ibid., p. 5. Leuchter told the present writer I was not familiar with any revisionist arguments or materials prior to my participation in the Toronto trial. (letter of July 24, 1992, italics added)

[6] Ibid., p. 18

[7] This survey of Leuchter's procedures is partly based on his own list of procedures, Ibid., p. 7

[8] Toronto, 1988. Property of Mr Ernst Zündel

[9] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of A Myth, p. 18. Italics in original.

[10] Cf. J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, p. 183. Pressac alleged, but provided no supporting evidence, that the number of people gassed in Kremas II and III totaled approximately 750,000.

[11] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of A Myth, pp. 13-14, 19-20

[12] Ibid., p. 14

[13] Ibid., p. 14

[14] 'German Pest Control Company'

[15] Cf. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 567-571

[16] Leuchter cites Nuremberg Document NI-9912. Richtlinien für die Anwendung von Blausäure zur Ungeziefervertilgung (Guidelines for the Use of Prussic Acid for Exterminating Vermin), issued by the Health Institution of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague, n.d.. NI-9912 describes Zyklon-B gas as having extraordinarily great penetrative powers (Außerordentlich großes Durchdringungsvermögen). NI-9912 is Appendix III of Leuchter's report.

[17] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 12

[18] Ibid., p. 12; also NI-9912, p. 3

[19] Table I, in Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 5; cf. also Amoklauf gegen die Wirklichkeit: NS-Verbrechen und Revisionistische Geschichtsschreibung, p. 47

[20] Ibid., p. 14. An Auschwitz museum official told the present writer, however, that much of the building — including the chimney, vents for letting gas in, and cremation ovens — had been reconstructed. One may wonder, therefore, why the building is still claimed, by tour guides and in many books, to be original and unaltered. This letter, from Krystyna Oleksa of the Panstwowe Muzeum Oswiecim Brzezinka appears below as Appendix VII.

[21] Ibid., p. 14

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid. Additionally, if genuine (and it almost certainly is not), the flimsy wooden door with ordinary window glass — not reinforced or double glazed — would not have been able to withstand the force of desperate victims pushing against it in their panic (Ibid., p. 131, photograph of door on same page).

[25] Ibid., p. 14. Rudolf Höß, Commandant of Auschwitz, stated in his autobiography that he personally witnessed the gassing of 900 Russians (Vergasung von 900 Russen) at one time in this room. Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höß, p. 122. See also p. 155

[26] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 15

[27] The original German blueprints for these facilities show that Leuchter's statistics regarding the elevators are accurate, (cf. Fundamentplan of Krema II, reproduced in Pressac, p. 293) This contradicts entirely the established view, largely based on the evidence of an eye-witness, Miklos Nyiszli, who stated that in each of these facilities Four good-sized elevators were functioning. They loaded twenty to twenty-five corpses to an elevator. (Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, p. 48) For the reliability of Nyiszli 's account, see above,

pp. 36-38

[28] The detailed American aerial photographs of these facilities taken on random occasions during 1944 show clearly that no gas ventilation stacks were present on Kremas II and III. The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex. See above, pp. 59-60

[29] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 15. Leuchter is quite wrong in concluding that no doors ever existed in the corpse cellar in Krema II. A written order from the Zentralbauleitung at the Auschwitz camp to the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH, dated March 31, 1943, requests a gas door 100 x 192 cm for corpse cellar I of Crematorium III … of exactly the same type and size as the cellar door of the crematorium opposite it, Crematorium II, with a peep-hole made of double-strength 8-mm glass, with rubber gasket and cap. (Gastür 100/192 für Leichenkeller II des Krematoriums III … genau nach Art und Maß der Kellertür des gegenüberliegenden Krematoriums II mit Guckloch aus doppeltem 8-mm-Glas mit Gummidichtung und Beschlag) (PMO: file BW 30/43, pp. 9, 34) One must exercise extreme caution, however, in citing this document as a requisition of gas-proof hardware for homicidal gas chambers; this same document also requests three gas-proof towers … of exactly the same dimensions and type as the towers previously supplied. (drei gasdichte Türme … genau nach den Ausmaßen und der Art der bisher angelieferten Türme) (Ibid., presented at Nuremberg as Document 4465-NO). The exact purpose of these towers is unknown, but they certainly were not homicidal facilities.

[30] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 15. Leuchter's assertion that only 278 persons could be gassed at a time in either Krema I or Krema II clearly runs contrary to the accepted historical view that 2,000 — 3,000 persons were gassed at a time in each of these facilities. The War Refugee Board Report (Washington, D.C.: November, 1944) states that 2,000 persons at a time were being gassed in the corpse cellar of each of these crematories (WRB I, p. 12), as does the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, in his affidavit of April 5, 1946 (Nuremberg Doc. 3868-PS). A higher killing capacity of 3,000 is reported by eyewitness Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who worked in the Birkenau camp. (Auschwitz: A Doctors Eyewitness Account, pp. 47-48) Numerous other eye-witnesses, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have testified that the capacity was indeed 3,000. Even Höß, who stated in his earlier affidavit (above) that 2,000 persons were gassed at a time, wrote in his report Die Endlösung der Judenfrage im KL Auschwitz that the gas chambers can hold about 3,000 people [Die Vergasungsräume faßten je 3000 Menschen] …, (Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höß, p. 160) It is worth noting that putting 3,000 persons into the 209 square metres of these rooms (excluding the space taken up by support pillars) would result in each square metre being occupied by 14.35 persons. It is the present writer's opinion that this capacity is exaggerated and impossible. Fitting 2,000 persons into this same area would result in each square metre being occupied by 9.5 persons, a possible but still improbable figure.

[31] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 15. Cf. Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, pp. 47-48: In the centre of the rooms, at thirty yard intervals, columns rose from the concrete floor to the ceiling. They were not supporting columns, but square sheet-iron pipes, the sides of which contained numerous perforations, like a wire lattice. Eugene Kogon, on p. 179 of his famous memoir Der SS-Staat (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1947) describes these flimsy gas-carrying columns as ventilation pillars (Ventilatorenpfeilern). Several historians of the Holocaust have carelessly accepted claims that there existed in the chambers of Kremas II and III these hollow sheet-metal columns, from which HCN was emitted (cf. Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1953), p. 151). The roof of each alleged gas chamber at these facilities had an outer measurement of 30.19 metres x 8.54 metres and a thickness of 0.44 metres. Constructed of concrete and covered with landscaped soil, these roofs would have weighed several tonnes each, and would have required numerous steel girders and / or reinforced concrete columns to support each of them. (Dimensions from Huta Drawing 109/14a of September 21, 1943 reproduced in Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 324. As Leuchter states, the original German blueprints show that there were no square, sheet-iron pipes in these rooms. Clearly depicted in the many known building plans are seven solid concrete support columns, measuring 0.4 metres x 0.4 metres, (cf. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, pp. 285, 287, 293, 327. et al.)

[32] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 15. The sealing of all walls, ceilings and floors in gas facilities is very important. The Germans were also aware of the great importance of properly sealing rooms or chambers in which gas was to be repeatedly used, as can [be] seen in the delousing facilities which still remain. These rooms are not only properly sealed with pitched tar, they also have ventilation fans and exhaust stacks. It is not unreasonable to assume that if the Germans took such precautions with their delousing chambers, they would also do so with homicidal gas chambers (cf. Leuchter, Were Six Million People Gassed?, Radio interview by Tom Valentine on Radio Free America, March 7, 1989).

[33] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 15

[34] Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 572

[35] Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1939-45, p. 149

[36] Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 295

[37] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 16

[38] Ibid., p. 16

[39] Ibid., p. 16 As this room is not in the immediate vicinity of a crematory, airing the room via these roof vents, whilst a very slow and impractical process, is considerably safer than it would be if the room was in, or next to, a crematory, as is the case with the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau. However, see footnotes 56, 57, 58 below.

[40] Ibid., p. 16

[41] Ibid., p. 16

[42] Ibid., p. 17

[43] Ibid., p. 17

[44] Ibid., p. 11

[45] Ibid., p. 13. Dr James Roth, the laboratory manager for Alpha Analytical Laboratories (Ashlands, Massachusetts), testified on April 21, 1988 at the second Zündel trial. He stated that the iron-cyanide compound was extremely stable. To remove it from porous material like brick, one would have to sand-blast or grind down the surface, or remove the compound chemically with a strong acid such as sulphuric, nitric or hydrochloric acid. Cf. SZTR, 33-9290, 9297, 9298

[46] Ibid., p. 16

[47] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, pp. 118-126

[48] Ibid., pp. 12, 13

[49] Ibid., p. 13. This alleged cremation time clearly contradict Höß's asinine assertion that the Auschwitz ovens cremated bodies, sometimes three to a retort, in twenty minutes (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage im KL Auschwitz, in Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 167), a rate also claimed by Nyiszli (Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, p. 51) and most historians of the Holocaust. Mr T. L. Jones, Director of the Cremation Society of Canterbury (First Floor, 192 Cashel Street, Christchurch, New Zealand), told the present writer, during an interview conducted on May 13, 1991, that it was impossible in the 1940s to cremate a corpse in twenty minutes. Jones, active in the cremation industry for over forty years, estimated that the time taken by the German crematories of the 1940s to incinerate a corpse, of average size and weight would have been more than two hours, depending on the temperature. Modern crematories, stated Jones, are very sophisticated and operate at higher temperatures than the coke- or coal-fired crematories of the 1940s. Nonetheless, a modern crematory still takes an hour to an hour mid a quarter to incinerate a corpse. Thus, Leuchter's statement about crematories and cremation times do appear to be consistent with known and proven data on human cremation. Cf. also the testimony at the second Zündel trial of Ivan Lagace, the crematory manager of the Bow Valley Crematorium in Calgary, Canada. It is essentially consistent with the claims of both Leuchter and Jones. (SZTR, 27-7383-7459)

[50] At this rate the crematory of fifteen retorts in each of Kremas II and III would incinerate 102 corpses per day. Leuchter points out, however, that in real-time — a rate of three corpses per retort per day — these crematories would only incinerate 45 corpses per day. This is clearly at variance with the accepted but implausible view that these crematories could each incinerate around 2,000 corpses per day, as claimed by many historians, and by Rudolf Höß in his report, Die Endlösung der Judenfrage im KL Auschwitz, (Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 167)

[51] As pointed out in footnote 29, there was a gas-tight door on the corpse cellar of Krema II, and probably one on that of Krema III. This, of course, is not proof in itself that the corpse cellars functioned as homicidal gas chambers. Gas-tight doors were, and are still, standard equipment on [aaargh: in?] air raid shelters. In 1939 orders were given throughout Germany that all hospitals, office buildings, military centres and other such buildings should have their basements equipped as air raid shelters. In an air raid, the door to a shelter should protect those inside from penetration of poisonous gases (from burst pipes, etc.) and from the suction of oxygen out of the shelter — a common effect of exploding bombs (particularly incendiary bombs). Thus, gas-tight doors were fitted on thousands of basements and cellars which doubled as air raid shelters. Contemporary German manuals on the construction of air raid shelters clearly show that gas-tight doors with peep-holes were recommended for such bomb shelters (cf. R. Scholle, Schutzraumabschlüsse (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Ernst und Sohn, 1939) and Luftschutz durch Bauen (Berlin: Bauweltverlag, 1939). It is quite conceivable that all or part of Leichenkeller II — at semi-basement level and with a very solid, reinforced concrete roof — doubled as an air raid shelter.

[52] The original German blueprint for the morgue's conversion to an air raid shelter (Bauleitung Drawing 4287 (a), Ausbau des alten Krematoriums. Luftschutzbunker für SS Revier mit einem Operationsraum (Conversion of the old crematorium. Air raid shelter for the SS hospital with an 'operating theatre') is reproduced in Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 156

[53] As confirmed in the letter to the present writer from Krystyna Oleksa of the Pantswowe Muzeum Oswiecim Brzezinka (Auschwitz State Museum), dated May 7, 1991: Wokresie 1941-1942 funkcjonowala rowniez przy przy krematorium komora gazowa (During the period of 1941 to 1942 it [Krema 1] also functioned as a gas chamber.)

[54]) for each person would be required, which is highly improbable.

[55] Cf. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 625. See WRB, I, p. 12

[56] Cf. Hydrogen Cyanide Storage and Handling (safety data booklet, published by Du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc., Wilmington, Delaware, Ed.), which appears as Appendix XI in Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, pp. 51-69

[57] Du Pont, Hydrogen Cyanide Storage and Handling, p. 2 (Leuchter, p. 54)

[58] in Zyklon for Pest Control (published by DEGESCH, Frankfurt, n.d.), which appears as Appendix XII in Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, pp. 71-96

[59] Document NI-9912 appears as Appendix III in Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, pp. 21-24

[60], and takes several hours. See Du Pont, Hydrogen Cyanide Storage and Handling, p. 5 (Leuchter, p. 57) and Document NI-9912.

[61] Cf. F. A. Leuchter, The Making of the Leuchter Report, Speech given at the Ninth International Revisionist Conference, Los Angeles, February 20, 1989 (IHR Audio-tape # A087); F. A. Leuchter, Did Six Million Really Die?; IHR Newsletter 75, October 1990, p. 3

[62] See below, pp. 32, 33

[63] SZTR, 32-8962

[64] Ibid., 32-8962

[65] Ibid., 32-8972

[66] The medical licenses to which Leuchter referred were issued by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Both were Research Licenses, the highest and broadest issued, allowing possession of all known substances, scheduled and unscheduled. After his testimony in Canada on behalf of Zündel, the medical licenses were not renewed by the issuing bodies, (details from Leuchter's letter to the present writer, July 24, 1992; also SZTR, 32-9056, 9057, 9058)

[67] SZTR, 32-9030. Judge Thomas did have the report filed as a lettered exhibit. Numbered exhibits may be examined by a jury. Lettered exhibits may not, but are created so that appeal court judges will comprehend what a given witness was referring to, and thus be in a position to agree or disagree on its admissibility.

[68] Leuchter, Were Six Million People Gassed?

[69] SZTR, 32-9254

[70] Cf. D. Irving, Hitler's War (1988 Papermac edition. First published 1977), pp. 391-2, 632, 660, 718, 761 et al. Irving's opinion was that Hitler did not order or (prior to mid-1943) have knowledge of the exterminations, which were initiated principally by Himmler and his staff.

[71] See below, p. 289

[72] Probably the best survey of Leuchter's testimony (and that of Faurisson, Irving et al.) at the trial, albeit from a slightly pro-Revisionist perspective, is Robert Lenski's The Holocaust on Trial: The Case of Ernst Zündel, pp. 353-398. The book was printed in Argentina, but published in the United States by Reporter Press, which operates from the same post box (Box 726, Decatur, Alabama 35602, U.S.A.) as Revisionist and Historical Video Tapes, Audio Tapes and Books, headed by David Clark. Interestingly, Clark also owns the sole United States publishing license for The Leuchter Report.

[73] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 4

[74] E. Zündel, Power Special Report, December 30, 1990, p. 2

[75] S. Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails. Demolishing Holocaust Denial: the end of The Leuchter Report (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation and Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, 1990). Leuchter and his report also feature prominently in numerous anti-Revisionist publications. Perhaps most notable is the very informative but partisan Amoklauf gegen die Wirklichkeit: NS-Verbrechen und revisionistische Geschichtsschreibung (especially pp. 42-70). Because it contains arguments almost identical to Pressac's, a separate discussion of this book is unnecessary.

[76] Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, pp. 55, 73

[77] Ibid., p. 14

[78] Ibid., p. 15

[79] See below, p. 222

[80] See below, p. 254

[81] Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, p. 29

[82] Despite his lack of credentials, Pressac was not new to the study of the gas chambers. He is, as noted above, the author of Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, a 564-page book confining [aaargh: containing?] commentary, original German blueprints (most not previously published), architectural drawings and photographs. The book was well-received by historians of the Holocaust and literary critics, although it has attracted little attention since. The New York Times (December 18, 1989) praised the book in a lengthy article, New Book is Said to Refute Revisionist View of Holocaust, by Richard Bernstein, who made much of the fact that Pressac had previously been a Revisionist. A similar claim, that he had very nearly become a 'revisionist', was made by Serge Klarsfeld (Truth Prevails, p. 29). However, both Robert Faurisson and Pierre Guillaume, who had worked closely with Pressac around 1980, deny that he was ever committed to Revisionism (cf. IHR Newsletter, Number 71, February 1990). Mark Weber wrote a short review of Pressac's book in the Summer 1990 issue of The Journal of Historical Review, and a persuasive article on one aspect of the book appeared two issues later (C. Mattogno, Jean Claude Pressac and the War Refugee Board Report, The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Ten, Number Four, Winter 1990-91, pp. 461-485). To date, however, the most substantial Revisionist refutation of Pressac's claims is Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers ou Bricolage et ´gazouillagesª à Auschwitz et à Birkenau selon J. C. Pressac, by Robert Faurisson (Revue d'Histoire Révisionniste, No 3, novembre-décembre 1990, janvier 1991, pp. 65-149).

[83] Ibid., p. 48

[84] Ibid., p. 36, Note: Faurisson did not accompany Leuchter to Poland.

[85] Ibid., p. 32

[86] Ibid., p. 45. Pressac's analysis of the flammability dangers of the alleged gas chambers is almost identical to the analysis of the present writer (above, p. 220), except that Pressac used HCN flammability limits in air of 5.6% to 40%, whereas the present writer used the Du Pont figures of 6% to 41% in his calculations. Although Pressac acknowledged that his figure differed slightly from the Du Pont figures, he did not explain why he chose to deviate.

[87] Ibid., p. 36

[88] Ibid., pp. 36, 37. Italics in original.

[89] Ibid., p. 37

[90] Pressac acknowledged (ibid., p. 36) that he got the HCN killing duration of all insects from DEGESCH sources, yet the insects referred to in DEGESCH's handbook on Zyklon (Appendix XII in Leuchter's report) are larder beetles, cockroaches, moths and ants. It is extremely unlikely that the flea-ridden and lice-ridden clothing of prisoners, which took approximately two hours to 'delouse, were submitted to a further four hours in the chambers in an attempt to destroy those other insects which did not, commonly, infest humans and their clothing (excluding stored clothing, of course).

[91] Ibid., p. 37. Italics added for emphasis.

[92] Shapiro (ed.). Truth Prevails, p. 38. The frequent disinfestation of buildings in the Nazi concentration camps is certainly not a lie. It has been demonstrated by Revisionist historians and by the wider historical profession. Pressac even contradicts himself, because in his book Auschwitz: Technique he had described at length the delousing process and concluded that almost all Zyklon-B transported to Auschwitz was used for disinfestation purposes.

[93] Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, p. 39

[94] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 14. Italics added for emphasis.

[95] Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, p. 40

[96] Ibid., p. 44

[97] Ibid., pp. 42, 43

[98] Ibid., pp. 46-48

[99] Leuchter, The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth, p. 32

[100] Bauleitung drawing 2036, January 11, 1943

[101] Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, p. 50

[102] Ibid., p. 51. There is some debate as to whether the CO equipment (the pipes and tanks) was present in the building when the camp was liberated by Soviet troops on July 23, 1944, or whether it was positioned there after liberation by the Soviets themselves. Pressac actually acknowledged that the alleged gassing buildings were extensively remodelled after liberation and that the two CO tanks were found elsewhere in the camp and placed in Bath and Disinfection Building no. 1 (Ibid., p. 53). When Mr D. P. Costello, Second Secretary in the New Zealand Legation, Moscow, was escorted around Majdanek in May 1945, he was informed by the Soviets that there was only one gas chamber in the camp — the small room in the shower block (German Extermination Camps, Report from the New Zealand Legation at Moscow, Wellington: New Zealand Department of External Affairs, 1945)

[103] Ibid., p. 52

[104] Pressac wrote: According to the official story, there were SEVEN [sic] homicidal gas chambers at K.L. Lublin- Majdanek … we still don't know much about these chambers (Ibid., p. 49)

[105] Ibid., p. 50. Pressac admitted that the two chambers in this shack, between fields I and 2 at K.L. Lublin- Majdanek, were used to delouse clothing using Zyklon-B. He also accepted this harmless utilization for another three of the chambers at the camp.

[106] Ibid., p. 52. Pressac, in writing that the natural (non-mechanical) airing out of such chambers would have taken a long time and been of little avail (Ibid., p. 54), unintentionally supports one of Leuchter's principal arguments: for a room to be frequently used as an execution gas chamber, it must have a mechanical gas exhaust system

[107] Ibid., p. 68

[108] Ibid., p. 66

[109] Ibid., p. 68

[110] Goodman's connection with 'Holocaust Survivors' is not indicated in the book. However, his name and title of Legal Advisor appear on the society's official letterhead (They were listed on the letterhead of a letter sent to the present writer by Shelly Shapiro, dated June 5, 1991).

[111] Ibid., p. 81

[112] Ibid., p. 99

[113] Tesch and two other defendants, Karl Weinbacher and Joachim Drosihn, were charged with supplying poison gas for the purpose of exterminating humans. Tesch was the head of TESTA (Tesch und Stabenow Internationale Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH / Tesch and Stabenow International Pest Control Company), the company which arranged the distribution of Zyklon-B east of the River Elbe. At the conclusion of the Hamburg trial the British Military Tribunal acquitted Drosihn, but convicted and subsequently hanged Tesch and Weinbacher.

[114] Cf. Faurisson, Leuchter bare secret Polish gas chamber study confirming Leuchter Report, IHR Newsletter, Number 79, April 1991, p. 1

[115] Instytut Ekspertyz Sadowych im. Prof. dr Jana Sehna w Krakowie. Krakow, dnia 24 wrzesnia (September) 1990 r.Dz. E. 720/190

[116] Ibid., p. 1: W zwiazku z prezentowonymi w publikacjach oraz w tra przewodow sadowych na Zachodzie opiniami iz w obozi konce racyjny m w Oswiecimiu gaz Cyklon B nie byl stosowany do usmiercania ludzi …

[117] Ibid., p. 4

[118] Ibid., p. 3

[119] Ibid., pp. 1, 6. Exposure of the chambers to the elements would not be sufficient to remove traces of ferro-ferri-cyanide, which is an extremely stable compound. See note 46 above.

[120] The blue staining on the exterior walls of the delousing chambers is mentioned in a remarkable letter by a former Auschwitz tour guide, Janusz Patek, published in the New York City Tribune (November 29, 1989, p. 13). Patek wrote that Auschwitz museum staff and guides believed that the claimed fatality figures for the camp were grossly inflated, but that they had to keep repeating the stories to get tips from the tourists. Epidemics, he said, were the main killers at Auschwitz, claiming the lives of about one hundred thousand inmates and around ten percent of the camp staff. Regarding Leuchter's report, he wrote that This pretentious, multipage report discovers what a good students [sic] in chemistry of an average Polish high school see with their naked eyes, namely total lack of deposits of blue salts of ferrocyanides in the gas chamber walls. On the other hand everybody is struck by the intensity of the blue discoloration of the plaster and even the outside brick work of the delousing building.

[121] Volume Ten, Number Three, Fall 1990, pp. 261-322

[122] Ibid., p. 280

[123] Cf. Ibid., p. 282

[124] Ibid., p. 287. Compare this concentration of 32 mg/kg with the concentration of 1050 mg/kg detected in the

sample taken from delousing facility no. 1 at Birkenau.

[125] United States Senate, 79th Congress, 1st Session. Report of the Committee requested by General Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Congress of the United States relative to atrocities and other conditions in concentration camps. May 15, 1945. Document 47 (Washington, D.C.)

[126] Ibid.

[127] Cf. Dachau Concentration Camp (OSS Section, United States 7th Army, 1945), p. 33

[128] Cf. Report on the Conditions in the Prison Camps, Captain P. M. Martinot, May 23. 1945, p. 226. U.S. Nat. Archives at Suitland, Maryland: RG 153, 19-22 BK. Quoted in The Second Leuchter Report, p. 297

[129] Cf. IMT, Volume V, pp. 167-173 (See also 3249-PS, IMT, Volume XXXII, pp. 56-64)

[130] IMT, Volume XIX, p. 434

[131] Cf. Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 134; Konzentrationslager Dachau, 1933-1945, Fifth edition (Dachau: International Committee, 1978) p. 165; Broszat, Die Zeit, August 16, 1960, p. 16. Nevertheless, numerous accounts of gassings at Dachau are still being written by former internees. Cf. R. Levesque, Memoirs (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1986) pp. 192-193; A. Haas, The Doctor and the Damned (London/Sydney/New York: Granada Books, 1984) pp. 98-99; et al.

[132] Cf. The Second Leuchter Report, p. 271. Emphasis in original.

[133] One example of these irrational statements is Document 2285-PS, the deposition of two French army officers, Lieutenant Jean Veith and Lieutenant Colonel Guivante de Saint Gast, May 13, 1945. These officers stated under oath that at Mauthausen The shooting took place by means of a measuring apparatus. The prisoner being backed towards a metrical measure with an automatic contraption releasing a bullet in his neck [as] soon as the moving plank determining his height touched the top of his head. (IMT, Volume XXX, p. 142)

[134] Document 1515-PS, the Deposition of the Camp Commandant of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, SS Colonel Franz Ziereis, and Document 3870-PS (209), Ziereis's final statement, are considered to be particularly unreliable (cf. Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 474; E. Le Chêne, Mauthausen: The History of a Death Camp (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 171). Ziereis made these statements during a lengthy interrogation, as he lay mortally wounded. He died less than thirty minutes after completing his final statement. (cf. Le Chêne. Mauthausen, p. 171)

[135] Cf. J. Bridgeman, The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1990); pp. 38-42, 45-49, 63, 103-111. According to Bridgeman, In the growing chaos of the last weeks, when the most rudimentary elements of order collapsed in the camps, even the SS lost the ability to single out its victims. The diseases that killed so many in the last days were even-handed and even the Kapos and the occasional SS man fell victim to them… The catastrophe which overwhelmed the camps in the last weeks was not the result of any policy at all; indeed, the government had largely lost the ability to implement any policy at all, as increasingly it was every man for himself. (p. 107)

[136] According to accepted opinion on the Holocaust, Himmler had abrogated his earlier extermination order in November, 1944 (Document 3762-PS, IMT, Volume XXXIII, pp: 68-69, affidavit of SS-Standartenführer Kurt Becher, March 8, 1946). It is alleged that, as a result of Himmler's new general order to cease all exterminations, the gas chambers in the eastern camps were dismantled and the remaining prisoners moved to the west (cf. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 631). Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that if mass gassings were carried out in the German Reich itself (including Austria), they would also have ceased in November 1944, in obedience to the Reichsführer SS. The corpses found in the western camps in late-April and May 1945, some five months after Himmler ordered all exterminations to stop, showed decay indicating that they were only there for weeks at the very most. Therefore, even if genocidal gassings were being carried out in the western camps, and they were not, the bodies found in April and May 1945 were not the result of these gassings. One important point should be made regarding this matter: despite Becher's claim, the order from Himmler that exterminations must cease has never been found and almost certainly never existed. See O. Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire nazi 1933- 1945 (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), pp. 13, 544

[137] The Second Leuchter Report, p. 284

[138] Ibid., p. 284. Cf. with photographs of the alleged gas chamber in Butz, The Hoax, pp. 65, 129, 148, 172

[139] Document 47 of the 79th Congress, 1st Session, of the united States. Leuchter may be in error on this matter. The U. S. Congressmen do state in this document that the ceiling is some 10 feet [3.03m] in height. Yet a well-known photograph of them inspecting the alleged gas chamber in May 1945, before they published their report, shows a ceiling height of approximately 2.3 metres, not the 3.03 metres they wrote in the report. This photograph can be seen in Butz, The Hoax, p. 148

[140] The Second Leuchter Report, p. 284

[141] Ibid., p. 285. Leuchter claimed that these dumps and the ventilation port were added after the construction of Baracke X, as is evident in the uneven replacement of the interior tiles and exterior bricks, some of which were broken in the process. There has never been agreement amongst scholar as to how the HCN was introduced into the room. Whereas many historians have stated that the gas was introduced through these dumps, others asserted (and some still do) — citing 1945 U.S. military reports or the accounts of former internees — that the gas flowed from the shower heads themselves. Cf. Suzman and Diamond, Six Million Did Die, p. 117

[142] Ibid., pp. 285, 286

[143] Ibid., p. 285

[144] Cf. Document 2753-PS: Alois Höllriegl, November 7, 1945 (IMT, Volume XXXI, p. 93); Document 3846-PS: Johann Kanduth, November 30, 1945 (IMT, Volume XXXIII, pp. 230-243); Document 3845-PS: Albert Tiefenbacher, December 7, 1945 (IMT, Volume XXXIII, pp. 226-227) et al.

[145] Cf. Document 3846-PS

[146] Cf. Document 2223-PS, August 3, 1945

[147] Cf. Le Chêne, Mauthausen, p. 84

[148] Cf. Document 449-PS, May 8, 1945; also Hans Marsalek (considered by many to be the leading authority on Mauthausen), Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen: Dokumentation, 1980 Edition (Vienna: Österreichische Lagergemeinschaft Mauthausen, 1974) p. 211.

[149] Cf. Le Chêne, Mauthausen, p. 84: The gas chamber at Mauthausen was filled with carbon monoxide, which was pumped down from the gas van when required.

[150] The Second Leuchter Report, p. 286

[151] Ibid., p. 286

[152] Ibid., p. 286

[153] Ibid., p. 275

[154] Ibid., p. 275

[155] For HCN to have been introduced into the room through this thin pipe, there would have had to have been a device in which the HCN could be heated to drive it from its solid, inert carrier. Hans Marsalek states that there was indeed such a gas introduction unit, into which a hot brick was placed to heat the HCN (Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen, p 211). As mentioned, Leuchter found no evidence that such a device had been removed or ever existed.

[156] Ibid., p. 211. Cf. Kogon, et al., Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, p. 246

[157] The Second Leuchter Report, pp. 286, 316

[158] Ibid., p. 288

[159] Ibid., pp. 287, 288

[160] Cf. Le Chêne, Mauthausen, pp. 96-104

[161] Ibid., p. 84. Le Chêne was correct in noting that many historians claim Hartheim was an euthanasia centre. Cf. Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 872-873; Dawidowicz, War, p. 133: Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 134; et al.; Franz Ziereis, Mauthausen commandant, said that Hartheim was an euthanasia centre and that professional criminals, non-reformable, were classed as mentally ill and sent to Hartheim to be gassed (Document 1515-PS). Ziereis also provided a relatively detailed description of the gas chamber at Hartheim Castle. We must, nonetheless, approach this document with caution, not only for the reasons mentioned above (p. 240, n. 134), but also because the document contains numerous inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies which seriously diminish its credibility. For example. Ziereis stated that between one and one-and-a-half million people were gassed at Hartheim Castle alone, which is clearly a flight of fantasy. This deathbed 'confession' was translated from Ziereis's German, and written down by Hans Marsalek, a former Mauthausen internee, in the presence of American intelligence officers who could not understand German (cf. Le Chêne, Mauthausen, p. 171). We have no way of confirming what resemblance, if any, Marsalek's translation bears to Ziereis's own words. It is possible that Marsalek, previously a prisoner of Ziereis, intentionally falsified his translation of Ziereis's words in order to make both his former captor and the German nation appear guilty of crimes more heinous than they actually committed. For these reasons, it is the present writer's opinion that the Ziereis 'confession' is not a source worthy of the historian's serious consideration.

[162] The Second Leuchter Report, p. 289

[163] Ibid., p. 286

[164] Ibid., p. 287

[165] Cf. B. Galanda, W. Lasek, W. Neugebauer, G. Spann, Das Lachout-Dokument: Anatomie einer Fälschung (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 1989), pp. 28ff.

[166] Document 2176-PS (312f)

[167]F. A. Leuchter, Le second rapport Leuchter avec préface et bibliographie critique de ROBERT FAURISSON, Revue d'Histoire Révisionniste, No 1, mai-juin-juillet 1990, pp. 51-115

[168] F. Leuchter, Witch Hunt in Boston. Speech given at the Tenth International Revisionist Conference, Washington, D.C., October 13, 1990. Transcript in Journal of Historical Review, Volume Ten, Number Four, Winter, 1990-1991, pp. 453-460.

[169] D. Irving, Churchill and the U.S. Entry into World War Two. Speech given at the Ninth International Revisionist Conference, Huntington Beach, Los Angeles, February 21, 1989, IHR Audiotape # A100)

[170] Holocaust Revisionism, p. 7

[171] Ibid., p. 8. See also The 1989 IHR Conference: White-Washing Genocide Scientifically. An ADL Fact- Finding Report (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1989), p. 4

[172] Smith and Leuchter on Boston TV (IHR Videotape # V049)

[173] IHR leaflet advertising VHS copies of Smith and Leuchter on Boston TV

[174] Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, p. 123

[175] Ibid., p. 112

[176] Ibid., p. 113

[177] Ibid., p. 113

[178] Ibid., p. 112

[179] Ibid., p. 15. Cf. also Zündel Pal Charged (UPI), The Toronto Sun, October 24, 1990

[180] E. Zündel, Power Special Report, December 30, 1990

[181] Leuchter, Witch Hunt in Boston, p. 458

[182] A. Estes, Controversial gas chamber expert fears for life if jailed on license rap, Boston Sunday Herald, February 24, 1991; J. Mayors, Execution consultant vows to hit protestors with suit, The Boston Herald, December 12, 1990

[183] Leuchter, Witch Hunt in Boston, p. 455. Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, pp. 2-22; Zündel Pal Charged.

[184] Nazi Researcher Won't Be Used As Helper At Illinois Execution (AP), St Louis Post Dispatch, August 18, 1990. It is interesting to note that Leuchter is called a Nazi Researcher — simply because he challenged accepted historical opinion on the Holocaust.

[185] Witch Hunt in Boston, p. 456

[186] Cf. J. Hart, Protest greets doubter, The Boston Globe, December 12, 1990; C. Ahem, Case draws attention of Jews worldwide, Maiden Observer, October 20, 1990; et al.

[187] Cf. C. Hoffman, We're not afraid to debate, Maiden Observer, February 23, 1991

[188] Text of speech in IHR Newsletter # 77, January 1991. Cf. also Protest greets doubter

[189] Witch Hunt in Boston, p. 454

[190] Ibid., p. 460

[191] J. Hart, Death machine builder under scrutiny for Nazi gas report. The Boston Globe, October 1, 1990

[192] According to Ross Vicksell of the Organization of New England Revisionist, Mr Leuchter says he is not a revisionist, but that does not square with his actions… He is a big star in the movement. Quoted in Ibid. Cf. also Remarks, Issue no. 2, September-October 1990, p. 3

[193] Power Special Report, December 30, 1990. The busloads of children that Zündel referred to were taken there to be part of the protest outside the court buildings. See Hart, Death machine builder.

[194] Kirk Lyons, Leuchter's attorney, headed the Patriots' Defense Foundation, a Houston-based legal defence fund designed to assist Americans persecuted or prosecuted because of their nationalism or unpopular beliefs. Lyons has defended, for example, Louis Ray Beam, a former Texas Grand Dragon of the Alabama-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Beam was acquitted on charges of sedition in 1988. Lyons's foundation, renamed CAUSE Foundation, is now located in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

[195] Cf. Remarks, Issue no. 3, November-December 1990; Power Special Report, March 5, 1991; J. Wikoff, The Leuchter Trial Proceedings, Christian News, February 25, 1991; et al.

[196] Hoffman, We're not afraid to debate

[197] Ibid.

[198] Ibid.

[199] Quoted in The Daily News-Mercury, January 23, 1991

[200] Quoted in IHR Newsletter No. 81, July/August 1991, p. 3

[201] See C. Loos, Le rapport Rudolf (1992), Revue d'Histoire Révisionniste, Number 6, May 1992, pp. 9-21

[202] Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 13, 1992