While this constituted a major blow to Leuchter’s credibility, an even greater one was delivered from a completely different source. A Frenchman who at one time had been intrigued by Faurisson’s contentions regarding gas chambers rendered a devastating assault on the deniers’ claims. Born in 1944 in France, Jean-Claude Pressac, a trained pharmacist, first visited Poland and the remains of the death camps in 1966. Sometime thereafter he decided to write a novel depicting life as it would have been had the Germans won. His research for this proposed book included another visit to Auschwitz in October 1979. This marked the beginning of an incredible personal and scientific journey that would have dire consequences for the claim that the homicidal gas chambers were a hoax. It was a journey that entailed years of study, more than fifteen trips to Auschwitz, and groundbreaking research in archives in the former Soviet Union.
During his research trip to Auschwitz in 1979 he examined photographs, documents, and work orders pertaining to the design and construction of the gas chambers. Perplexed by what appeared as contradictions in the plans, Pressac questioned museum officials and archivists about the construction of the gas chambers. Officials allayed some of his doubts by showing him an array of plans and documents relating to the camps and the execution chambers.5* Though Pressac acknowledged the power of their arguments, he remained troubled by the fact that he could not find on the drawings the specific designation “gas chamber.” Pressac’s confusion was, in fact, justified because, as he learned, a number of the gas chambers were not originally built as homicidal units but were transformed to serve that purpose.85 When he subsequently examined the documentation on this transformation, he found an abundance of evidence attesting to the specific purposes of the gas chamber. But before he reached that point he engaged in a potentially dangerous but illuminating detour; he almost became a denier.
During his visit to the Auschwitz archives, Pressac learned of a French professor who had made a very brief visit to the archives in 1976 but after two days took ill and left. Shortly thereafter this professor published a series of articles asserting that hydrocyanic-acid homicidal gas chambers were an impossibility and that therefore the annihilation of the Jews at such places as Auschwitz was only a legend, the result of historical fakery if not purposeful deceit.86 On his return to France, Pressac sought out Robert Faurisson. Impressed by Faurisson’s seemingly vast array of knowledge and “serious and unimpeachable references,” Pressac began to meet with him on a regular basis.87 The meetings lasted for approximately nine months, during which time, Faurisson, anxious to co-opt the pharmacist into the ranks of Holocaust deniers, opened his files to him.88 Initially Pressac found himself greatly attracted to Faurisson’s arguments. After a number of months of intensive contact, the meetings because less frequent. Pressac broke off all contact in April 1981, when he discovered that for Faurisson “dogma [was] paramount” to truth. Pressacs own reading of the documents convinced him that Faurisson’s arguments were fatally flawed.
After Pressac broke with Faurisson he recognized that it was not Faurisson’s theories that attracted him but the professor’s seeming ability to explain away something that was inherently unbelievable. This is the deniers’ ultimate trump card. They have the only rational explanation for something that remains, despite massive research, essentially irrational: It could not happen. When Pressac subjected deniers’ theories to documentary analysis he understood that they were not just scientifically flawed. They ignored reams of evidence that proved precisely what Faurisson and his cohorts wished to deny.
Pressacs doubts about Faurisson’s methodology first surfaced when together they reviewed weekly reports on the prisoners killed at the concentration camp near Strasbourg, Natzweiler-Struthof. In August 1943 a gas chamber was put into operation there in order to provide August Hirt, a professor at the Strasbourg University Institute of Anatomy, with skeletons for his collection. Another professor, Otto Bickenbach, availed himself of the gas chambers to conduct medical experiments on prisoners. Approximately 130 people, primarily Jews and Gypsies, were killed in it. When Pressac and Faurisson reviewed the documents from the camps, Pressac saw the “honest and meticulous professor in a more worrying light.”89 The camp administrators had prepared weekly reports on the number of prisoners in the camp. Two reports from August 1943, the month the gas chamber started operating, contained important evidence. The report of August 14 indicated that there had been 90 Jews present at the outset of the week of whom 30 had “left” the camp deceased. The report for the next week indicated that of the 60 remaining at the beginning of that week, 57 had died. This extremely high death rate, two weeks in a row at precisely the time the gas chamber commenced working, aroused Pressac’s suspicions. He soon discovered additional evidence. On all the other reports some cause of death was entered on the reverse side. In these two cases the reports were left blank. All other deaths were recorded in the Natzweiler town hall. In the case of these deaths no record was kept.90 Pressac considered the two reports “damming evidence” that these Jews had been killed en masse. However, Faurisson had a ready “explanation.” The forms used for the week of the fourteenth and twenty-first of August differed slightly from previous ones. (They were printed in Gothic script while previous ones had been printed in Roman script.) Faurisson explained to his doubting disciple that the change in script confused the SS. Instead of listing the Jews on the line for “liberation,” the SS mistakenly listed them on the line for “deaths.” And somehow the SS made precisely the same mistake two weeks in a row. This convenient explanation, which ignored an array of contradictory evidence, constituted a “warning bell” for Pressac. Faurisson’s explanations no longer seemed as precise and logical as they had; they certainly bore little relationship to the evidence.
(It is ironic that Pressac’s doubts should have been aroused by Faurisson’s treatment of the Natzweiler reports. Apparently at the time Pressac did not know that the Waffen-SS unit that supervised the building of the gas chamber left behind a document that explicitly described the facility’s purpose. They submitted a bill to Strasbourg University’s Institute of Anatomy for the “construction of a gas chamber.”91)
Faurisson’s description of his meeting with Auschwitz museum officials sounded yet another alarm for Pressac:
I made one of the Auschwitz Museum officials, Mr. Jan Machlek, come to the place (Crematorium I). I showed him the furnaces. I asked him “Are they authentic?” He replied “Of course!” I then passed my finger across the mouth of one of the furnaces. I showed him there was no soot. With an embarrassed air, he told me that these furnaces were a “reconstitution.”92
Faurisson made it appear as if he had caught this official in a lie and forced him to tell the truth.6* But it was Faurisson, not the museum representative, who engaged in obfuscation. Faurisson’s contention that, if the furnaces were authentic, soot should have been present, more than thirty-five years after they had been used made as much sense as his claim that the SS officers could decipher a form printed in Gothic script. Equally manipulative was his claim that it was his revelation that there was no soot present that forced the “embarrassed” official reluctantly to admit that the facility was a “reconstruction.” Why should the official have been embarrassed? The museum’s own photographs demonstrate that the structure was rebuilt after the war.93
This kind of tactic is typical of deniers, Faurisson in particular. In 1987 he appeared on a radio interview show in France. Another guest on the show was a Holocaust survivor who—the host told Faurisson prior to the show—had been interned in Auschwitz from April 11, 1943, until April 11, 1945. Faurisson immediately told the host that this was impossible because most prisoners at Auschwitz were evacuated in January 1945. According to Faurisson, when the host reported these objections to the survivor, “the latter, not without some embarrassment, then had to confess that he had been transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in the last months of the war.”94 Relying on what has become a mainstay of deniers’ reason
ing, Faurisson contended that if one item was false much if not all else was false. The survivor, Faurisson wrote to the host of the show, “lied to you on this point. I fear he lied to you and to the listeners on many other points.”95
Once again, as in the case of the Auschwitz museum official, one wonders why the man should have been embarrassed. It is common knowledge that Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945 and that the Soviet Army entered the camp shortly thereafter. (By April they had reached Berlin.) Why would this former prisoner have lied about something so widely known? His “lie” did not make his experience sound more severe. If anything, his “admission” that he was evacuated in the final months of the war intensified his saga of suffering. This was a time when the Nazis marched survivors of the death camps west to Germany to keep them from falling into the liberators’ hands. Thousands died as a result. The host may have assumed that when the survivor said he was interned for two years, the entire time was spent in Auschwitz. Faurisson transformed what in all likelihood was a misunderstanding into a deliberate lie that was part of a nexus of conspiratorial falsehoods.
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 pl
an” 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
Branding Irving and Leuchter “Hitler’s heirs,” the British House of Commons denounced the former as a “Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist” and the latter’s report as a “fascist publication.”109 One might have assumed that would have marked the end of Irving’s reputation in England, but it did not. Condemned in the Times of London in 1989 as a “man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception,” Irving may have had his reputation revived in 1992 by the London Sunday Times.110 The paper hired Irving to translate the Goebbels diaries, which had been discovered in a Russian archive and, it was assumed, would shed light on the conduct of the Final Solution. The paper paid Irving a significant sum plus a percentage of the syndication fees.8*
Journalists and scholars alike were shocked that the Times chose such a discredited figure to do this work. Showered with criticism, the editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, denounced Irving’s views as “reprehensible” but defended engaging Irving because he was only being used as a “transcribing technician.” Peter Pulzer, a professor of politics at Oxford and an expert on the Third Reich, observed that it was ludicrous for Neil to refer to Irving as a “mere technician,” arguing that when you hired someone to edit a “set of documents others had not seen, you took on the whole man.”111
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