Shofar FTP Archive File: people/l/leuchter.fred/press/washington-post.0691
Archive/File: holocaust/usa/leuchter wpost.061891
Last-Modified: 1994/05/11
Holocaust Revisionist Admits He Is Not Engineer.
The Washington Post, June 18, 1991, FINAL Edition
By: Christopher B. Daly, Special to The Washington Post
Section: A SECTION, p. a06
Story Type: News National
Line Count: 73 Word Count: 802
BOSTON, June 17 - Fred A. Leuchter Jr., a self-styled
expert in the machinery of death who parlayed his reputation as
a builder of killing equipment into a second career as a proponent
of "Holocaust revisionism," has admitted that he is not an engineer.
Made in a consent decree filed with a Massachusetts court last
week, his admission should deal a blow to the movement holding
that the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews and others during
World War II was a hoax or an exaggeration, according to experts
in the field.
Leuchter, 48, of suburban Malden, was to face trial later this
month on charges of practicing engineering without a license,
a violation of Massachusetts law. But on June 11, he signed a
consent agreement with the board that licenses engineers.
In it, Leuchter acknowledged that, "I am not and have never
been registered as a professional engineer" and that he
nevertheless had represented himself as an engineer in dealings
with various states that use the death penalty and to which he
supplied equipment or advice.
The agreement also requires Leuchter to stop disseminating
reports in which he purports to be an engineer, most significantly
a document known as the "Leuchter Report."
That report, widely circulated by revisionists, asserts that gas
chambers at Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz, Birkenau and
Majdanek could not have been used for mass killings because they
were not big enough nor well ventilated or sealed. The assertion
is based largely on chemical analysis of materials scraped
surreptitiously from walls of those chambers by Leuchter during a
visit to Poland in February 1988.
Sally Greenberg, an attorney with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
B'rith in Boston, which was instrumental in bringing Leuchter to the
attention of Massachusetts authorities, welcomed the settlement.
"It's a blow to Holocaust revisionism because he has been the
guru of the revisionists," she said. "Now, he has as much as admitted
that he is not qualified as an engineer to comment on the 'myth'
of the Holocaust. It's essentially an admission that he's the
charlatan and phony that we always knew he was."
Leuchter, a slight, bespectacled man whose father was a prison
guard, has made a specialty of devising, selling and installing
equipment for carrying out executions, including an injection
device. As a result, he has been the subject of many profiles
in the national news media, none of which delved into his
involvement with groups that deny the Holocaust.
After signing the consent agreement, Leuchter issued a
one-page statement. "There is no finding nor has there been
any admission of guilt on the part of Leuchter," it said,
adding that he plans to prepare immediately to seek an
engineering license.
"Mr. Leuchter and his defense counsel will not make any further
statements regarding the legal resolution of the case," it
said. Leuchter did not return telephone calls. Nor did his
attorney, Kirk Lyons of Houston, whose practice includes
defending white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members.
David Wyman, a historian who wrote a 1984 study of American
reaction to the Holocaust, said stripping Leuchter's
"engineering" credentials could be important because the
scientific aura surrounding his report could have lent
credibility to the revisionist movement, which he called a
mask for antisemitism.
"American society has advanced to the point that we don't
accept bigotry openly," said Wyman, a professor at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "That means
antisemites have had to retreat, to dress it up in a
more palatable fashion, pretend it's scholarship."
Michael Bernbaum, project director of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, said discrediting Leuchter's
expertise was important, but that to a "fringe group" of
virulent antisemites it would make no difference whether
Leuchter had an engineering license.
"The revisionists are the equivalent of a flat-Earth society,"
he said. "The Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented
events in history. The perpetrators have never denied it."
Deborah Lipstadt, a Los Angeles author who is writing a book on
the Holocaust revision movement in the United States, said
Leuchter was being cited increasingly in revisionist circles as
a scientific authority whose report "proved" that Nazi death
camps never operated as survivors have said.
"The fact that he claimed to be an engineer was central to the
whole issue," Lipstadt said. "He's not just your local kook.
He was their scientific cover. In that sense, he is a
substantial figure."
The revisionist movement is a loose grouping of people who
question the Holocaust for a variety of reasons, from admiration
for Nazis to antisemitism and opposition to Israel. An influential
hub of revisionist thinking is the Institute for Historical
Review in Torrance, Calif., which has publicized Leuchter's
work.
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2008
