The Leuchter Report Proved No Gas Chambers

This is the single most-cited piece of denier “evidence” on the gas chambers. It has its own short history. The Leuchter Report was commissioned and paid for by Ernst Zündel, the Canadian-based Holocaust denier, for use in his second trial in Toronto in 1988 for publishing material falsifying the Holocaust. The report was prepared by Fred A. Leuchter, an American who at the time described himself as an engineer specialising in execution equipment. It was rejected as evidence by the Canadian court. Its qualifications, methodology, sample collection and chemical analysis were each examined and found to be defective by professional engineers, professional chemists, the operator of the laboratory whose tests Leuchter cited, and the Canadian and German courts that subsequently considered it. Leuchter himself, under cross-examination at the Zündel trial, conceded that he had no engineering qualifications.

What Leuchter actually did

Leuchter spent three days at Auschwitz in February 1988, accompanied by a video camera and a draughtsman. He took thirty-one fragments of brick and mortar from the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau and from the gas chamber at Auschwitz I. He also took two control samples from buildings he believed had been used for delousing rather than killing. He sent the samples to the Alpha Analytical Laboratories in Massachusetts and asked them to test for hydrogen cyanide residues. The lab returned its results in standard form: cyanide concentrations in micrograms per kilogram of sample. Leuchter’s killing-chamber samples mostly returned trace concentrations or none; his control samples from the delousing chamber returned much higher concentrations. From this comparison Leuchter argued that the killing chambers had not in fact been used for killing.

The argument fails at every step. The samples from the killing chambers were taken from buildings that had been wholly or partially demolished by the SS in 1944 and 1945, exposed to the weather for over forty years, and (in the case of crematoria II and III) had had their entire ventilation and structural top destroyed in the demolitions. Leuchter took fragments of plaster from these ruins. The control samples from the delousing chamber came from a building that had been continuously roofed and protected from the weather for the entire forty-year interval. Comparing fragments from a ruin to fragments from an intact building is not a chemical comparison; it is a comparison of weathering rates, of which it tells you nothing about killing.

What the lab said about the samples

James Roth, the chemist at Alpha Analytical Laboratories who had tested the samples, was contacted by the makers of the Errol Morris film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. in 1998. Roth said on camera that Leuchter had not told him the purpose for which the samples had been collected, that he had not been asked to analyse them in the way Leuchter subsequently used them, and that the comparison Leuchter drew was not a comparison the laboratory’s results could support. Roth’s specific objection was that the lab tests measured cyanide content in the entire sample by mass, including the deep interior of each fragment, whereas any reaction between hydrogen cyanide and the wall surface would have been confined to the outer microns of the wall material. Diluting a surface trace through the entire sample mass produces a near-zero reading even where the surface had in fact been heavily exposed. Roth said that, had he been told what the samples were for, he would have used a different testing method. The film records this exchange.

The Polish forensic study

The proper test was conducted by the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków under the leadership of Professor Jan Markiewicz between 1990 and 1994. The Polish team used a different sampling method (taking only the surface micrometres of the wall material, where any reaction product would actually be) and a different analytical method (microdiffusion and ion chromatography for low-concentration cyanide detection). Their study, published in Z Zagadnień Sądowych in 1994, found hydrogen cyanide reaction products in the killing-chamber samples at concentrations consistent with the buildings having been used for repeated mass gassing, and at concentrations which, given the weathering, demolition and forty-five-year interval, were precisely what would be expected. The Polish study has been the standing professional forensic answer on the question for over thirty years. No professional forensic chemist has published a refutation in any peer-reviewed journal.

Leuchter’s own qualifications

At the Zündel trial in Toronto in April 1988, Leuchter was cross-examined by Crown counsel John Pearson on his engineering credentials. Leuchter had described himself as an engineer in his report. Under oath, he admitted that he had no engineering degree and was not a registered or licensed engineer in any American state. He had a bachelor’s degree in history from Boston University. He had worked on execution-equipment design through a private firm but had no qualification entitling him to call himself an engineer. The Massachusetts Attorney General subsequently prosecuted Leuchter in 1991 for fraudulently practising as an engineer; he settled by signing a consent agreement undertaking to stop describing himself as an engineer. The professional body of American forensic engineers, the National Society of Professional Engineers, and the equivalent state licensing boards, have all formally noted that Leuchter is not and was not an engineer in any recognised professional sense.

The Zündel trial judge, Justice Ron Thomas, ruled the Leuchter Report inadmissible as evidence in the trial; Zündel was convicted. The Federal Republic of Germany subsequently considered the report in two separate court proceedings (the Mannheim Court in 1991 and the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court in 1993) and ruled it inadmissible on the same methodological grounds. No court has ever accepted it.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the Leuchter Report disproved the gas chambers is harmful because it persists in denier circulation despite having been refuted at every level on which it could be refuted: legally (rejected by every court that considered it), professionally (its author was not in fact an engineer), methodologically (its sampling and analytical methods were wrong by the standards of forensic chemistry), and substantively (the proper Polish study, conducted by qualified forensic scientists using appropriate methods, returned the opposite result). The report has been refuted on the record, in court, in the professional literature, and in a feature documentary by an Academy Award-winning film-maker. To accept the claim, one would have to dismiss the chain of refutation in its entirety. The Leuchter Report is the example of a denier claim that has been so comprehensively answered that its continued circulation is itself a marker of bad faith.

What were Leuchter’s actual qualifications? What did the laboratory that tested his samples say about his methods? What did the proper forensic study by the Kraków Institute find?

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Sources

• Fred A. Leuchter Jr., An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat Publishers, 1988 (the report itself, in its Zündel-published form)
• Cross-examination of Fred Leuchter by John Pearson, transcript of Her Majesty the Queen v. Ernst Zündel, Ontario District Court, Toronto, April 1988
• Errol Morris (director), Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., Fourth Floor Productions, 1999, with on-camera interview of James Roth of Alpha Analytical Laboratories
• Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubała and Jerzy Łabędź, “A Study of the Cyanide Compounds Content in the Walls of the Gas Chambers in the Former Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps”, in Z Zagadnień Sądowych, 30, 1994
• Massachusetts Attorney General, consent agreement with Fred A. Leuchter Jr. on the unlawful practice of engineering, June 1991, on file at the Office of the Attorney General, Boston
• Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002, with full treatment of the Leuchter Report and its refutation in the Irving v. Lipstadt trial
• Mr Justice Charles Gray, judgment in David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, paragraphs on the Leuchter Report
• Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001, with the Leuchter chapter
• Shelly Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails: Demolishing Holocaust Denial: The End of “The Leuchter Report”, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1990
• Nizkor Project, “The Leuchter FAQ”, https://www.nizkor.org, with the full point-by-point technical refutation
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Pseudoscience and Holocaust Denial: The Leuchter Report”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org