A Quarter Century
Ago: 'The Leuchter Report'
In February 1988, Fred Leuchter
Jr. (photo), in the 1980s America’s only expert for execution technologies, was asked by the defense team of German-Canadian Ernst Zündel to go to the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps in Poland to verify whether or not the facilities actually used poison gas to kill inmates. He agreed to do this and
to write an expert report about his findings to be used in a Canadian court of law where Zündel was being tried for
HOLOCAUST denial at that time. Leuchter performed the work he was asked
for, and the result was the so called 'Leuchter Report' .
The contents of the report, in particular Leuchter's methodology, were heavily
criticised, as Leuchter had no in-depth knowledge of what he was investigating, and he had only a few weeks to get at least a superficial idea about the issues
involved. However, the idea that the HOLOCAUST had yet to be the subject of real, forensic, critical scrutiny caught on in many circles around the world. Ever since, a growing number of people has chipped in to widen the scope and scale of such research, to deepen its reach, and to improve and solidify the
results.
Subsequent to the work for producing his first report, Leuchter also went to other
camps (Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim) and wrote a similar report about these
locations. In a third report, Leuchter described the technique of execution gas chambers as used in the U.S. for capital
punishment. In a fourth report, Leuchter commented a book on gas chambers written by the French scholar
J.-C. Pressac .
Whereas the first 'Leuchter Report' was the target of much criticism, some of it
justified, the other three reports were hushed up by mainstream media and
scholars.
Roughly 25 years after the publication of the first 'Leuchter Report', a
new US edition of November 2012 republishes the unaltered text of all four reports and accompanies the first one with critical notes and research
updates.
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