The Second Leuchter-Report

The Second Leuchter Report

FOREWORD

By Dr. Robert Faurisson

Fred A. Leuchter is a 46 year old engineer who lives in Boston. He is a specialist in planning and building execution facilities for American penitentiaries. One of his particular tasks was the modernization of the execution gas chamber in the penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri.

Ernst Zündel is a 50 year old German who lives in Toronto, where he had a brilliant career as a graphic artist and advertising man, until he was boycotted because of his revisionist opinions. Since then, he has spent almost all his time struggling against lies about the "Holocaust". I have helped him in that struggle, especially during the two trials which a Canadian Jewish organization forced him to undergo in 1985 and 1988. The first trial lasted seven weeks and ended with him being sentenced to 15 months in prison for "publication of false news". That verdict was thrown out on appeal because of serious errors made by District Court Judge Hugh Locke. The second trial lasted four months. This time Ernst Zündel was sentenced to nine months in prison by District Court Judge Ron Thomas. This second verdict may also be successfully appealed on the same grounds.

In 1988, Ernst Zündel asked Fred Leuchter to visit Poland to examine "the alleged execution gas chambers" in the three concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. The conclusion of that first Leuchter Report was quite clear: no such gas chambers ever existed in those three camps.

In 1989, he asked Leuchter to visit West Germany and Austria to examine the alleged "gas chambers" at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle. The conclusion of the second report, as you will read below, is just as clear: there never were any homicidal gas chambers in those three places.

People have called revisionism "the great intellectual adventure of the late twentieth century." That adventure really began shortly after the Second World War with the publication of the works of Maurice Bardeche and Paul Rassinier. It continued in 1975 with the masterful work, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Dr. Arthur Butz of the United States, and in 1979 with the creation of the Institute for Historical Review in Los Angeles. During the 1980's, thanks in particular to the activities of Ernst Zündel, revisionism worldwide has developed so much that future historians will probably talk about revisionism before and after Zündel. In a way, those politically motivated trials - which are a disgrace to Canada - will probably change everything. Zündel promised in 1985 that his trial, even if he were to lose, would put the Nuremberg Trial on trial and that the slanderers of Germany would meet their "Stalingrad" there. He was right.

Before Zündel

Before Ernst Zündel, Germany's accusers never even thought about proving the existence of the "gas chambers". They treated their existence as "proven".

According to exterminationist Serge Klarsfeld:

"It is clear that during the years after 1945 the technical aspects of the gas chambers were a subject that was neglected since no one imagined that someday we would have to prove their existence." (Le Monde Juif, January-March, 1987, p. 1)

At the time of the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the Frankfurt trial, as well as at the time of many other infamous trials, including the Klaus Barbie trial in 1987, no one tried to prove the horrible accusation that has so long weighed upon the vanquished German nation. Those judicial travesties were similar to witchcraft trials in which the accused and their defence lawyers, did not question the existence of the Devil and his supernatural doings. In these modern witchcraft trials, it has been taboo to question the existence of "gas chambers" and their supernatural accomplishments, which defy all the laws of physics and chemistry. Even Klaus Barbie's French defence attorney, Jacques Verges, refrained from asking for even the slightest proof of the existence of the "gas chambers" to which Klaus Barbie allegedly sent the children of the French town of Izieu.

In all the trials of so-called "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity", all the supposedly civilized nations have for nearly a half-century ignored the elementary rules of criminal law.

To understand what I mean, let's take the example of some crime committed in France. Let's suppose that in this case there is a weapon, a body, and a killer (or assumed killer). Allowing for exceptions, the French court would normally demand four routine reports:

1. A technical study of the weapon used to commit the crime;
2. An autopsy report of the victim to show how and by what means death occurred;

3. A report on the re-enactment or simulation of the crime in the presence of the accused at the scene of the crime;

4. A report on a visit by the judges, the prosecutor, the defendant and the defence lawyers, to the scene of the crime.

Even if the defendant had confessed, the judges would never decide that no further investigations need be carried out; a confession, to have any great judicial value, must be verified and confirmed.

However, in nearly half a century no one has ever met those elementary standards in a case which involves not just an ordinary crime perpetrated by a single person with an ordinary weapon (whether "blunt instrument" or firearm), but instead is a crime that supposedly was unprecedented, that had been committed against millions of people, using an extraordinary weapon that no judge had ever seen before in his entire life: a "super gas chamber" for thousands of victims, a virtual mass-production chemical slaughterhouse!

The first trials of Germans accused of having used "gas chambers" or "gas vans" to kill people began in 1943 in the Soviet Union. They continue to this day in Israel, West Germany and France and will soon take place in Australia, Canada and Britain. Today, after 46 years of such trials, we still do not have:

1. Any expert report concluding that a given place or a given van was used for homicidal gassing;
2. Any autopsy report concluding that the victim had been killed by the poison gas hydrogen cyanide, which formed the base of the insecticide, Zyklon B;

3. Any report on the re-enactment of a gassing operation, using the thousands of victims claimed and the steps taken, and taking into consideration the dangerous chemicals involved;

4. Any account of an on-site visit to examine a place or a van suspected of having been used for homicidal gassings, using the forensic investigative techniques used in modern criminology.

In the course of the trial concerning the Struthof-Natzweiler camp, in Alsace, an expert study was in fact made of the "gas chamber" and of the "gassed" bodies (kept at the civilian hospital in Strasbourg), but in each case, Professor René Fabre, a toxicologist, concluded that none had been gassed. As regards Dachau, there was in fact a kind of expert report carried out by Captain Fribourg, of the French army, but when the report concluded that it would be necessary to examine the room provisionally called the "gas chamber", no such examination was carried out.

Some on-site visits by the courts did in fact take place during some trials, notably the Frankfurt trial (1963-65). The scandal is that some parts of the Auschwitz camp were viewed then by the visiting official party, but not the supposed "gas chambers", in spite of the fact that they were there, either in their original condition (as claimed to this day by Polish Communist officials and publications) or in ruins from which much could be determined (see Wilhelm Stäglich, The Auschwitz Myth, Institute for Historical Review, 1986).

A re-enactment, which is by definition a simulation, would have been easy to carry out at Birkenau. It would have immediately shown the foolishness of the gassing accusations. Filmmakers sometimes shoot Hollywood-type docu-dramas at Birkenau, claiming to retrace the arrival of the Jewish convoys on the ramp at Birkenau, near the crematory buildings that were supposed to contain (a) a changing room where the victims would take off their clothes; (b) a homicidal gas chamber; (c) a room containing five crematory ovens with three retorts each. We are told that each group of victims numbered some 2,000 people and there were several such groups burned each day in each crematory. We can see from the size of the buildings and the arrangement of the surrounding area that any re-enactment would immediately result in fantastic tie-ups and overcrowding. The clogging up of the crematories would be spectacular. Decomposing, rotting bodies would pile up all over the area! Assuming that it took the average funeral industry time of one and a half hours to incinerate one body, it follows that after one and a half hours had passed we would find ourselves with the original 2,000 bodies minus the 15 that had been burned, still leaving 1,985 bodies with no place to put them before burning! The "machinery of death" would break down with the first gassing. It would take eight days and eight nights to incinerate 2,000 bodies, assuming continuous operation of the crematoriums. According to cremation experts and crematory operating manuals, however, no crematoriaum can operate continuously, day and night, like that.

Let's talk about the witnesses who testified at these modern witch trials. In all of these inquisitions, persons have come forward to offer themselves as living witnesses of the "Holocaust" and of the "gas chambers". How did they, according to their own stories, escape the gas chambers? Their answer was very simple: every one of them had benefitted from a miracle. As each survivor passed through one so-called "death camp" after another, he considered his life a sum of miracles. The members of the "Sonderkommandos" beat all the records. According to their stories, the Germans usually also gassed them every three months, which means that two years spent at Auschwitz and Birkenau would mean a total of seven or eight consecutive miracles for those champions. Only rarely at such trials have the lawyers or judges dared to betray their surprise at so many miracles and so many people saved by miracles. The Olympic champion of gas chamber survivors, Filip Müller, the immortal author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, had some problems with this question at the Frankfurt trial, but he found the perfect answer: he disdainfully explained that the story about the regular liquidation of the "Sonderkommando" was merely a legend. It is disturbing that the general public, historians, and judges let themselves be bamboozled to such an extent by these supposed witnesses to the "Holocaust". For Simone Veil, former French Minister and head of the European Parliament, to offer herself as a living witness to, and as living proof of, the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz, is the height of impertinence. If she is the living proof of anything, it is that the Germans did not exterminate the Jews at Auschwitz. Veil, her mother and one of her sisters were always together: at Drancy (a French transit camp), at Auschwitz, at Bobrek (a sub-camp of Auschwitz), and at Bergen-Belsen. It was in that last camp that they contracted typhus, usually considered a deadly disease at that time in history. Veil's mother died there. Like her two daughters, she too had survived Auschwitz. Another daughter survived Ravensbrück.

Personally, I do not consider anyone a "witness" unless he or she successfully undergoes the test of being cross-examined, by competent and impartial interrogation, about the physical aspects of the facts which he or she reports.

Please read what I say here carefully: in no trial has a supposed witness of the "gassings" been cross-examined about the physical aspects of the gassing he said he had participated in or witnessed. Even in the trial of Tesch and Weinbacher, sentenced to death and executed from having made or sold Zyklon B, prosecution witness Charles Sigismond Bendel, on whose testimony the two were largely condemned, did not undergo that kind of cross-examination (see William Lindsey, Zyklon B, Auschwitz and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch, The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1983, p. 10-23). As a matter of principle and as a defence tactic, lawyers for the accused have avoided the taboo of the "gas chambers" by limiting themselves to saying that while gas chambers existed, their clients did not gas anyone.

After Zündel

With the arrival of Ernst Zündel, the veil of such trickery was ripped asunder. This man had the courage not to let himself be intimidated. He showed that the emperor indeed had no clothes. He confounded the rascals with his direct, no nonsense approach. As a consequence, the prosecution's experts and witnesses suffered a severe defeat at his trial. And Ernst Zündel, moving to the counter-offensive, taught a superb lesson to historians and judges. He showed them what they ought to have done all along. Historians and judges ought to have, in a sense, begun with the beginning, which as we all know, is sometimes very difficult to do. Trying first and foremost to establish what physically had taken place, Ernst Zündel, at his own expense, sent to Poland a U.S. expert on execution gas chambers, along with his team. This expert, Fred Leuchter, took samples from the ground, the walls, and the floors of the alleged gas chambers and then had them analysed by an American laboratory.

I described elsewhere how the experts and witnesses for the prosecution were routed during the 1985 and 1988 Toronto trials (see Robert Faurisson, The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988), The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-1989, pp. 417-431). I am not going to return to that subject. I would only like to make it clear that this judgment is not simply my subjective judgment. The proof that I am telling the truth is that at the 1988 trial, exterminationism's number one expert, Raul Hilberg, the "Pope" of the Holocaust Legend, refused to come back to testify since he still had painful memories of his defeat in 1985 at the hands of Zundel's defence attorney, Douglas Christie. He said as much in a letter to Prosecutor John Pearson, a letter that was supposed to have remained confidential but which the defence heard about and caused to be made public. Dr. Rudolf Vrba, the other star witness of the 1985 trial, did not come back either for the 1988 trial. Prosecutor Pearson, asked by Judge Ron Thomas whether some "survivors" would come, had to respond pitifully (I was present) that they would not come this time.

Because of my pity for them, I will not refer here (as I have already done in the above-mentioned article) to the statements made in 1988 by Red Cross representative Charles Biedermann, an apparently honest and intelligent man who, however, frequently gave evasive and misleading answers, and by Professor Christopher Browning, who gave a distressing display of what an American university professor can be: confused, ignorant, of unlimited naivete, a lover of money and a man without scruples. In him, we had a university professor who accepted $150 an hour from the Canadian taxpayer to come to Toronto to crush and help throw into prison just one man - Ernst Zündel - for publishing in Canada a 14 year old essay which had been distributed freely in Great Britain and in Browning's own country.

To me, one of the principal results of the first Leuchter Report was just that it made one simple fact strikingly clear: that no forensic expert study of the "weapon" used to carry out the "Holocaust" crime had previously been done. Since his report was made public, in April of 1988, Leuchter has not found a single person, including those who have shown their anger about his findings, who could refute his report with any other report that had previously been drawn up (I am not talking here, of course, about the expert reports ordered by Instructing Magistrate Jan Sehn of Poland, reports that had nothing to do with the subject). As regards those who would criticise some parts of the Leuchter Report, I invite them to make their own investigation and get their own laboratory reports.

There still remains one solution outlined by Fred Leuchter himself in his paper given in Los Angeles in February 1989 during the Ninth International Convention of the Institute for Historical Review: the establishment of an international committee of experts on the problem of the gas chambers. As early as 1982, French historian Henri Amouzoux, with whom I had discussed my research, confided to me that he hoped for such a solution. He told me in so many words that what he wanted was an "international" commission, definitely not a "national" commission, since the French seem incapable of any open-mindedness on the question of the gas chambers.

The Polish authorities, unless they develop a sudden appetite for glasnost, will oppose with all their strength any inquiry of that kind, just as they oppose all normal access to the archives of the State Museum of Auschwitz, especially to the death registers (Totenbücher), left behind by the Germans that would give us an idea of the real number of those who died at Auschwitz and the cause of their deaths. In 1987, Tadeusz Iwaszko, the director of the Archives in the Auschwitz Museum, told French journalist Michel Folco (in the presence of pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac, one of Serge Klarsfeld's friends) that "If we were to carry out excavations that did not uncover any proof of the existence of the gas chambers, the Jews would accuse us other Poles of having suppressed the evidence." {Note: On August 8, 1989, Ernst Zündel wrote to Michel Gorbachov, informing him that he had learned of the capture of the Auschwitz death registers by the Soviet Union from the trial testimony of Red Cross delegate Charles Biedermann. He requested access to the registers and suggested that it would be a gesture of goodwill if the registers were released. In a perhaps happy coincidence, the Soviet Union released the registers one and a half months later.}

It is likely that the first Leuchter Report will for a long time remain the first and last word about the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. As a pioneering effort, it has opened a particularly fertile field of research for others to follow and expand upon.

The Second Leuchter Report

The Second Leuchter Report is also a pioneering work, this time on the question of the alleged gas chambers at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim.

I did not accompany Leuchter and his team to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, but I had thought since 1977 that the American gas chambers which used cyanide gas had to be studied to know the absurdity of the alleged German gas chambers which allegedly used Zyklon B, an insecticide which base is hydrogen cyanide. I hoped, without really believing it, that some day an expert on the American gas chambers would visit Auschwitz and carry out the kind of physical and chemical study that ought to have been carried out by any honest judicial or historical inquiry.

In 1979, at the time of the first international convention of the Institute for Historical Review, I myself mentioned that idea to several people, especially to Ernst Zündel. In the years that followed, I abandoned all hope. I must say that even among some revisionists I did not find very much interest in my idea. Perhaps it appeared too bold or too unrealistic, but Ernst Zündel abandoned neither the idea, nor the hope of succeeding. In the preface to the first Leuchter Report, I told how, thanks to Ernst Zündel and to Canadian attorney Barbara Kulaszka, I was able to meet Fred Leuchter in Boston, and how the expedition to Poland was organized.

For the expedition into West Germany and Austria, I was part of the Leuchter team. In the report that you are about to read, Fred Leuchter gives us all the important information about the members of that team and about the nature and result of his mission.

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