Mr. Death

film by Errol Morris

Review by The Plaid Adder
Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com

Errol Morris made two of our favorite documentaries: Vernon, Florida, a collection of interviews with the inhabitants of a rural Florida town who are all so quietly loopy that after a while one begins to wonder if these people are not in fact actors who are being paid off, and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.(In case anyone cares, our other favorite documentaries are Paris is Burning, Bananas is my Business--a fascinating documentary about Carmen Miranda-- and Hands on a Hard Body, which is not a porn film but in fact a documentary about a contest held every year by a Nissan dealership in Texas which gives away a free truck to the person who can stand there with his/her hands on in for the longest consecutive period of time.) Errol's thing seems to be putting together enigmatic portraits of people who are obsessed, whether it's with the idea that sand will eventually reclaim the universe or with the life and habits of the mole rat. In the case of Mr. Death, the obsession is a little harder to characterize. The documentary's subject-one Fred Leuchter-is apparently famous for two things. One: partly through happenstance and partly through his own initiative, he became the leading U.S. expert on execution equipment. Two: as a result of his work with, among other things, gas chambers, Leuchter was recruited by one Ernst Zundl-a German living in Canada who was being prosecuted for distributing literature claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax-to try to prove that there were no gas chambers in operation at Auschwitz. Zundl's organization sent Leuchter to Auschwitz (without the permission or indeed the knowledge of any of the local authorities) along with a camera crew to get samples of bricks and mortar from the gas chambers to take back to America and have tested for evidence of cyanide. Leuchter testified during Zundl's trial that these samples had all tested negative and that this proved that these facilities had never been used as gas chambers. Holocaust deniers claimed a major victory; Leuchter began reaping the consequences of his actions.

The film spends about equal time on both phases of Leuchter's career. Each would be disturbing enough in itself; taken together they become a profoundly unsettling and deeply depressing commentary on the consequences of accepting-either as an individual or as a society-the fact of state-sponsored executions. Leuchter does most of the talking in this film, although the cinematography, editing, and interspersed segments of interviews with more credible Holocaust historians testify to an authorial voice which is outside of and antagonistic to Leuchter's; and according to Leuchter, he got into the business of designing and manufacturing execution equipment out of a sincere desire to make the process more humane. Watching him talk about the difficulties involved in making execution safe, humane, and stress-free is instructive on many levels. Leuchter appears to believe in good faith that one can make an execution, if not necessarily pleasant, at least relatively painless. And it is obvious that the only thing that allows him or anyone else to believe this is the machines. The only reason you need a lethal injection machine, as opposed to a doctor with a hypodermic syringe, is so that you can eliminate the factor of individual responsibility; the human presses a button, but it's the machine that kills the victim. Making an execution "humane" may spare the victim some physical anguish, but it also sanitizes what must, no matter how it is done, be a brutal and bloody process. All of the technologies Leuchter designs are attempts, in their own right, at denial: denial of the central and irrefutable fact that there is no way to take a healthy, living, adult human body and turn it into a corpse without mutilating, burning, tearing or poisoning it.

My sense from the audience I saw the film with was that people felt that it was kind of a jump for Leuchter to go from manufacturing execution equipment to becoming a tool of the Holocaust denial movement. I don't see the transition as particularly surprising. As the other historian Morris interviewed pointed out, archival evidence indicates that the Nazis who were involved in running the camps dealt with their business the same way the Tennessee department of corrections et. al deal with theirs-by using technology and the language of euphemism to avoid directly confronting the brutality of their own actions. Having participated in our country's project of denial, why should Leuchter balk at participating in Zundl's? It is true that there is something extra-surreal about watching the videotape of Leuchter's covert operations in Auschwitz, which were all recorded by a Canadian cameraman. Leuchter bumbles around the ruins with his hammer and chisel looking like everyone's dorky but harmless Uncle Egbert, chipping bits off the walls and stuffing the debris into Ziplock bags. He's the ultimate ugly American tourist, crashing around a historic site without seeming either to understand its significance or appreciate the amount of damage he's doing. The essential bogusness of his investigation is obvious to anyone just from watching the tape, but based on an initial screening after which Morris was dismayed to find that the audience was treating Leuchter's findings as potentially credible, he added in footage of interviews with a professional historian who introduces us to some of the archival evidence that proves the existence and operation of gas chambers as well as an interview with the chemist who tested the samples at the lab where they were processed (who explains that the test itself could not possibly either confirm or deny Zundl's claims). When the projectionist fell asleep at the switch and left us with a long pause between reels, we all had a moment to discuss this particular segment of the film amongst ourselves. It struck me as an object lesson about the dangers of scientific materialism. Leuchter gets his lab results back and immediately assumes that this one "scientific" finding must necessarily outweigh huge mountains of documentary, eyewitness and archeological evidence to the contrary. The "Leuchter Report"-published and internationally distributed by a helpful British Holocaust denier who I really wanted to smack every time I saw him on screen-is useful to the Holocaust denial movement because there's an unspoken assumption in this country that hard science is the last word in proof. The idea that "scientific evidence" can be flawed, falsified, or simply inconclusive-or even that the same "evidence" can be manipulated to support wildly different conclusions-is something that most laymen in this country will not accept, even after strenuous efforts at persuasion. (Trust me; I'm still trying.) The Leuchter story points out how dangerous that mindset can become. Because as long as people are willing to privilege "scientific" evidence over documentary evidence, history will always remain vulnerable to people who are willing and able to finance and promote bogus escapades like this. I was watching the footage of the other historian going through the archives-the invoices for the gas chamber equipment, the comminuques sent between SS officers, blueprints of the crematoria, photographs of the victims-and thinking about how easy it would be for us to get to a point where nobody was being trained to read these things, when the work of turning a pile of written evidence into history will have become obsolete because unfunded and we are left at the mercy of the labs and the special kind of ignorance created by the triumph of scientific materialism. As the historian says, "If Leuchter had only gone into the archives...but then I don't think Leuchter knows German, so I don't suppose it would have helped." As time passes and there are fewer and fewer people left alive who can say yes, this happened, I was there, it will become easier and easier for these people to persuade others to give in to the irresistble human desire to believe that we are better than we are, that horrible things do not happen and that a single lab result can wipe the deaths of six million people off the map of our world.

I know that some Holocaust organizations have come out against Mr. Death as being in itself harmful. I don't buy that. The film does a good job of debunking Leuchter's claims about the Holocaust-or not so much debunking them as refusing to grant them credibility in the first place. And given that the denial movement is out there, we need to be aware of how and why it does its work. Beyond that, though, Mr. Death forces us to evaluate our society's own assessment of the value of human life, and contemplate the possible correspondences that would have given Leuchter's career this strange trajectory. A good date flick, this is not; but it sure as hell is a conversation starter, and as Leuchter's own self-absorbed and seemingly untroubled ignorance demonstrates, this country really needs to have more conversations.