Within a few days Leuchter left for a week in Poland. Accompanied by his wife, a cinematographer supplied by Zundel, a draftsman, and an interpreter, the group toured Auschwitz/Birkenau and Majdanek. In light of the fact that Zundel paid Leuchter approximately $35,000 to make the trip,{28} one cannot help but wonder what would have been the reaction if Leuchter had returned to confirm the existence of gas chambers. However, Leuchter’s leanings were revealed by his observation that although Zundel and Faurisson could not accompany the group, they were ex-officio members of the team, whose spirit was with them “every step of the way.”{29}
The group spent three days in Auschwitz/Birkenau and one in Majdanek surreptitiously and illegally collecting bricks and cement fragments—Leuchter called them “forensic samples”—from a number of buildings, including those associated with the killing process. On returning to Massachusetts, Leuchter had the samples chemically analyzed. (He told the laboratory that the samples had to do with a workmen’s compensation case.) He summarized his findings in The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, Poland, which was published by Zundel’s Samisdat Publications and David Irving’s publishing house, Focal Point Publications in London.[3] In it he concluded that there had never been homicidal gassings at any of these sites. Leuchter claimed that his findings were based on his “expert knowledge” of the design criteria for gas chamber operation, and his visual inspections of both the remains of the chambers and of “original drawings and blueprints of some of the facilities.” The latter, he asserted, had been given to him by officials of the Auschwitz museum.{30}
According to Leuchter the design and fabrication of these facilities made it impossible for them to have served as execution chambers.{31} Moreover, Leuchter argued, given the size and usage rate of the alleged facilities at Auschwitz and Majdanek, it would have required sixty-eight years to execute the “alleged number of six millions of persons.”{32} (This typifies the deniers’ methods of obfuscation: No one had claimed that the gas chambers at Auschwitz or Majdanek were used to kill six million people. Millions of people died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen and at other death camps.)
Deniers consider Leuchters testimony at the trial a “historical event.” It marked, Faurisson claimed expansively, the end of the “myth of the gas chambers.”{33} Emotions were intense as Leuchter tore away the “veil of the great swindle.” Faurisson described his own feelings as a mixture of “relief and melancholy: relief because a thesis that I had defended for so many years was at last fully confirmed, and melancholy because I had fathered the idea in the first place.”{34} The record reveals that something quite different occurred. If any veil was lifted it was that of Leuchter’s expertise. On the stand Leuchter was shown to have little technical training to equip him to reach his conclusions. The judge derided aspects of his methodology as “gross speculation” and dismissed his opinion as being of no greater value than that of an ordinary tourist.{35}
Perhaps Faurisson’s relief was also rooted in the fact that he knew that despite the revelations about Leuchter’s lack of credentials and his fallacious scientific and historical methodology, the Leuchter Report would have a life of its own, as has been the case with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be a forgery. In fact, when it was originally published in France in the midnineteenth century, Jews did not appear in the book at all. Only at the beginning of this century was it rewritten with Jews as the primary culprits. This easily documented information has not stopped the Protocols from being accepted by people in different parts of the world as a factual rendition of “international Jewry’s” nefarious goal to rule the world. So, too, Faurisson may have recognized that Leuchter’s so-called scientific report would make Holocaust denial plausible despite its having been shown to be rooted in spurious scientific principles.
With the jury out of the room, the court began to determine Leuchter’s qualifications as an expert witness. When the Crown Counsel questioned him about his training in math, chemistry, physics, and toxicology, he acknowledged that his only training in chemistry was “basic… on the college level.” The only physics he had studied likewise consisted of two courses taken when he was studying for a bachelor of arts (not sciences) degree at Boston University. Admitting that he was not a toxicologist and had no degree in engineering, he rather cavalierly dismissed the need for it.{36} To this the judge responded sharply:
THE COURT: How do you function as an engineer if you don’t have an engineering degree?
THE WITNESS: Well, I would question, Your Honour, what an engineering degree is. 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.
THE COURT: Who determines that? You?{37}
Throughout the trial Judge Ronald Thomas made it clear that he was appalled by Leuchter’s lack of training as an engineer as well as his deprecation of the need for such training. The judge was particularly taken aback by Leuchter’s repeated assertions that anyone who went to college had “the necessary math and science” to be an electrical engineer and to conduct the tests he conducted at Auschwitz.{38} The judge ruled that Leuchter could not serve as an expert witness on the construction and functioning of the gas chambers. The judge’s findings as to Leuchters suitability to comment on questions of engineering was unequivocaclass="underline"
THE COURT: I’m not going to have him get into the question of what’s in a brick, what’s in iron, what is in—he has no expertise in this area. He is an engineer because he has made himself an engineer in a very limited area.{39}
Unknown to the court, Leuchter, who admitted under oath that he had only a bachelor of arts degree, was not being entirely candid regarding his education. Implying that an engineering degree had been unavailable to him, he told the court that when he was a student at Boston University, the school did not offer a degree in engineering. In fact it did, three different kinds.{40} Later in the trial, when the jury returned to the room, Zundel’s lawyer and Leuchter obfuscated the paucity of his training:
3
The London edition was entitled