The Leuchter report is a pseudoscientific document authored by American execution technician Fred A. Leuchter, who was commissioned by Ernst Zündel to defend him at his trial in Canada for distributing Holocaust denial material. Leuchter compiled the report in 1988 with the intention of investigating the feasibility of mass homicidal gassings at Nazi extermination camps, specifically at Auschwitz. He traveled to the camp, collected multiple pieces of brick from the remains of the crematoria and gas chambers (without the camp's permission), brought them back to the United States, and submitted them for chemical analysis. At the trial, Leuchter was called upon to defend the report in the capacity of an expert witness; however, during the trial, the court ruled that he had neither the qualifications nor experience to act as such.
Leuchter cited the absence of Prussian blue in the homicidal gas chambers to support his view that they could not have been used to gas people. However, residual iron-based cyanide compounds are not a categorical consequence of cyanide exposure. By not discriminating against that, Leuchter introduced an unreliable factor into his experiment, and his findings were seriously flawed as a result.
Background
In 1985, Ernst Zündel, a German pamphleteer and publisher living in Canada, was put on trial for publishing Richard Verrall's Holocaust denial pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?, which was deemed to violate Canadian laws against distributing false news. Zündel was found guilty, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. This led to a second prosecution.
Zündel and his lawyers were joined by Robert Faurisson, a French academic of literature and Holocaust denier, who came to Toronto to advise the defense, having previously testified as expert witness at the first trial. Drawings of where the samples were taken from, the film footage of their physical collection and Leuchter's notebook detailing the work were surrendered to the trial court as evidence. It is not only this disparity that Leuchter cites, but accordingly from his samples (which included measurements of it) that he claims he measured much more cyanide in the delousing chambers than in the gas chambers, which he argues is inconsistent between the amounts necessary to kill human beings and lice.
thumbnail|Gas chamber in [[Majdanek concentration camp with blue residue]]
The problem with Prussian blue is that it is by no means a categorical sign of cyanide exposure. This difference is one of the reasons behind the concentration disparity. Another exceedingly sensitive factor by which very small deviances could determine whether Prussian blue may form is pH. pH could be affected by the presence of human beings. Markiewicz and his team were not optimistic at being able to detect cyanides so many years later; nevertheless, having the legal permission to obtain samples, they collected some from areas as sheltered from the elements as possible.
Other criticisms
By order of Heinrich Himmler, the crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau were destroyed by the SS in order to hide evidence of genocide. Nothing more than the bases of Crematoria IV and V can be seen: the floor plans of both facilities are indicated by bricks laid out across the concrete foundations, and Crematoria II and III are in ruins. Professor Robert Jan van Pelt labels Leuchter's comment that the facilities have not changed at all since 1942 or 1941 as "nonsense". – over 186 times more than the lethal dose of 300 ppm. Critics estimate conservatively that within 5 to 15 minutes, gas chamber victims were exposed to 450 – 1810 ppmv The basement gas chambers of Crematoria II and III were mechanically ventilated via motors in the roof space of the main crematorium structure capable of extracting the remaining gas and renewing the air every three to four minutes.
When ventilation was not used such as in Crematoria IV and V (although a ventilation system was later installed in Crematorium V in May 1944), Sonderkommando prisoners wore gas masks when removing the bodies.
At various times (such as in the summer of 1944 when the crematoria couldn't keep up with the extermination rate), bodies were burnt in open-air pits. Accordingly, the capacity of the crematoria was never a limiting factor, and the pits yielded practically no limit to the number of corpses that could be burnt.
See also
- Jean-Claude Pressac
- Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
References
<!--See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes for an explanation of how to generate footnotes using the