Given the exposure of Leuchter’s historical and technical deficiencies at the Zundel trial, the publication of Pressac’s findings, and his encounter with the Massachusetts legal system one might assume that his report would have been totally discredited. But, in an amazing display of incompetence and culpability, a number of powerful and respected media outlets have enhanced Leuchter’s credibility and enabled deniers to use his pseudoscientific work to assault the truth. In February 1990 an article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, “Justice: A Matter of Engineering, Capital Punishment as a Technical Problem,” intended—according to the editorial staff of the magazine—to depict Fred Leuchter as the eccentric but legitimate headsman of the execution industry.{96} The author, Susan Lehman, described Leuchter as a “trained and accomplished engineer” who was more conversant with electric chair technology than anyone else: He keeps a chair in his basement. Despite the article’s contempt for Leuchter’s specialization—killing people—it cast him as an expert who was “distressed” to find that much of this nation’s execution equipment was defective. Leuchter’s apparatus, Lehman wrote, was designed not to torture its victims.{97}
While the story was apparently intended to present Leuchter as a ghoulish grim reaper who “likes what he does,” deniers began to cite it as validation of Leuchter’s expertise.{98} The IHR Newsletter identified Leuchter as the man “certified by the Atlantic as America’s leading expert on gas chambers and other execution systems.” As soon as the article appeared the Atlantic, one of America’s most prestigious magazines, was deluged with phone calls.{99} The editors acknowledged that they had not known about Leuchter’s lack of training, false claims to be an engineer, involvement in Holocaust denial, appearance as an expert witness for Zundel, or his denier-sponsored investigative trip to Poland. The editors defended themselves by claiming that his participation in the deniers’ efforts had “no direct bearing” on the subject of the article. The publisher of the magazine protested that neither he nor his staff could be expected to know about Leuchter’s “hobby.”
As an expression of its contrition—a simple computer search in a media data base would have revealed Leuchter’s involvement in the Zundel trial—the magazine agreed to publish one letter on Leuchters background.
If the Atlantic was guilty of incompetence, the same cannot be said of “Prime Time Live,” the ABC television show starring Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson, which aired a segment on Leuchter in May 1990. Entitled “Dr. Death,” the piece profiled Leuchter as “the country’s foremost expert at creating, designing and maintaining execution equipment. His business… is death.” Weeks before this segment aired, Beate Klarsfeld and Shelly Shapiro found out about it. They alerted ABC executives to the fact that Leuchter had been a witness at the Zundel trial, where the presiding judge had ruled that his report could not be used as evidence because he was not a toxicologist, chemist, or engineer. They told the television executives that Leuchter had become a regular participant in IHR and other extremist gatherings and that the Leuchter Report, which had been condemned by the British House of Commons as a “fascist publication” and “pernicious” effort, is distributed by white supremacist and extremist groups.{100} They also screened Leuchter’s video of his trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The “Prime Time” producers were cautioned that airing the segment would enhance both Holocaust denial and the reputation of a thoroughly discredited man. Bob Currie, the ABC “Prime Time” producer in charge of the segment on Leuchter, informed Shapiro and Klarsfeld that Leuchters reputation and activities, which were already known to him, were not germane.{101} “Prime Time” ignored letters from scholars in this field urging them not to proceed with this segment. (A personal letter I sent to the executive producer of the show explaining why this was a dangerous move was never acknowledged.) After the segment aired Currie justified his failure to include any reference to Leuchter’s activities as a Holocaust denier by arguing that it simply “wasn’t relevant to what the story was about.”[7] He blamed the “sanitization” of Leuchter’s background—that is, the elimination of references to his Holocaust denial activity—on decisions by “high-ups” including Ira Rosen, senior producer, and Rick Kaplan, executive producer.{102}
In October 1990 the New York Times entered the fray. A front-page news story on the methodology of capital punishment left no doubt that Leuchter had become a controversial if not discredited figure in the execution business. It identified him as someone whom opponents of capital punishment consider a “metaphor for much that is wrong with the death penalty.” The article made a passing reference to his involvement in denial activities.{103} An editorial the following week again referred to Leuchter, condemning capital punishment and observing that Leuchter had become persona non grata in the execution business because of his unorthodox and controversial methods. While it acknowledged that Leuchter “once told a Canadian court that he regarded the killing of Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers as a myth,” it dismissed this as of little significance to “the culture of executioners,” in which such views do not “disqualify” him. “Leuchter, after all, only designs death machines; others create the market for them.” Portraying Leuchter as an innocent cog in a perverse system, the editorial declared that the problem was not “with the headsman [but] with the system.” Despite its shortcomings, the editorial together with the previous article destroyed whatever remained of Leuchter’s “technical credibitility.”{104}
But it was another major media institution, London’s Sunday Times, that eventually gave the Leuchter Report and its proponents another lease on life. David Irving, who during the Zundel trial declared himself converted by Leuchter’s work to Holocaust denial and to the idea that the gas chambers were a myth, described himself as conducting a “one-man intifada” against the official history of the Holocaust.{105}
In his foreword to his publication of the Leuchter Report, Irving wrote that there was no doubt as to Leuchter’s “integrity” and “scrupulous methods.” He made no mention of Leuchter’s lack of technical expertise or of the many holes that had been poked in his findings. Most important, Irving wrote, “Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved.” Irving identified Israel as the swindler, claiming that West Germany had given it more than ninety billion deutsche marks in voluntary reparations, “essentially in atonement for the ‘gas chambers of Auschwitz’” According to Irving the problem was that the latter was a myth that would “not die easily.”{106} He subsequently set off to promulgate Holocaust denial notions in various countries. Fined for doing so in Germany, in his courtroom appeal against the fine he called on the court to “fight a battle for the German people and put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust which has been told against this country for fifty years.” He dismissed the memorial to the dead at Auschwitz as a “tourist attraction.”{107} He traced the origins of the myth to an “ingenious plan” of the British Psychological Warfare Executive, which decided in 1942 to spread the propaganda story that Germans were “using ‘gas chambers’ to kill millions of Jews and other ‘undesirables.’”{108}
7
In the segment Leuchter took the film crew on a tour of the North Carolina chamber. The impression given viewers was that he had worked on this facility when, in fact, he had not.