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The film begins on a surreal plane, as Fred Leuchter talks about his career as a designer of execution equipment. The son of a prison guard, Leuchter found himself in the execution game when, as an electrical engineer, he offered his services to help fix the electric chair used in North Carolina. His motivation? Humanitarian; previously the device in place would torture the prisoner before killing him. After his success in North Carolina, other states contacted him to help with their execution devices, and Leuchter helped devise lethal-injection devices, gas chambers, and gallows as well.
From here, though, the film takes an even more bizarre twist. During this time in the late 1980s, Ernst Zündel was arrested in Canada for publishing neo-Nazi materials. Zündel hired Leuchter, as an expert on gas chambers, to go to Auschwitz to gather evidence of the Holocaust. Leuchter surreptitiously videotaped himself illegally gathering chunks of rock from the concentration camp, which he then analyzed. From these results he determined that the Holocaust did not occur, and he became an active historical revisionist. What he viewed as his definitive achievement, his paper The Leuchter Report, ultimately led to his fall, as states wouldn't work with him, Jewish groups targeted him, and neo-Nazis sought him.
Mr. Death is frequently disturbing to watch, and Morris allows Leuchter to speak his mind with few interruptions. The tale that emerges is spellbinding, as Leuchter comes off not as anti-Semitic but as a deluded man with strong albeit misguided convictions. He is a fascinating character, and the only thing missing is more personal information about him beyond his daily intake of 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes. --Jenny Brown
| ACTORS: | Fred A. Leuchter Jr. |
| CATEGORY: | Video |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 14 January, 2000 |
| MANUFACTURER: | Vidmark / Trimark |
| MPAA RATING: | PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) |
| FEATURES: | Closed-captioned, Color, Original recording reissued, NTSC |
| TYPE: | Documentary, Feature Film Drama, Feature Film-drama, Movie |
| MEDIA: | VHS Tape |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
| UPC: | 031398836131 |
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Customer Reviews of Mr Death: Rise & Fall of Fred a Leuchter Jr
Ironies upon ironies Irony: Leuchter does what he can as an engineer to make electric chairs and other killing devices more humane for the person being put to death. <
>Irony: Leuchter does a very cursory exam of death camp remains to see if there were really gas chambers there. <
>Irony: Leuchter shows up regularly at anti Semitic rallies and functions as a speaker. This contributes to the destruction of his marriage and his general fall from grace, reputation-wise. <
>And the whole time, he never seems to have the ability to see what's going on and what he's doing wrong.
Malignant Nerd
Fred Leuchter is vain and pathetic. He can easily be imagined jury-rigging the toaster to electrocute the family pet. He is Cree-pee, with a capital "C". Leuchter, the son of a Massachusetts prison employee-on "Take the Kids to Work Day", his father let him sit in the electric chair-invented the lethal injection machine that is in use in the death chambers of several states. He is, or was (he doesn't get much work anymore), a self-styled "execution technician". He has tinkered with electric chairs, gas chambers, and gallows in his effort to make the extinguishing of human life by the state more "humane", for Leuchter says he believes in capital punishment, not "...capital torture".
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>The first part of Errol Morris's excellent documentary about Leuchter, "Mr. Death", deals with Leuchter's grisly human extermination work. Here, Leuchter seems almost like some quirky basement inventor, as he proudly shows off his deadly "equipment". The film shifts gears when Leuchter, for some reason, is hired as an expert witness by Ernst Zundel ("The Hitler We Loved and Why") to aid his defense in a Toronto trial against the charge of publishing Holocaust denial material-a crime in Canada-by traveling to Aushwitz and two other death camps to gather samples from gas chambers and crematoria to be examined for cyanide. No cyanide, no Holocaust-The Myth of the Six Million. Ignoring for the moment that Leuchter was completely unqualified to conduct any sort of scientific experiment-his formal education ended with an undergraduate degree in history and he is not the engineer he claimed to be-it is more than offensive to see him, oddly clad, owlishly bespectacled, chipping away with hammer and chisel-unauthorized-in this liminal place, a place where the living meet the dead, in an attempt to prove that the dead, so many dead, weren't dead at all.
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>Leuchter's testimony was shredded in court and Zundel convicted but Leuchter's "research", now dubbed the "Leuchter Report", has been embraced by the Holocaust deniers; millions of copies are in print in many languages. It is nothing more than a grubby little anti-Semitic tract
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>spit-shined to a pseudo-scientific sheen.
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>Mr. Morris does not swat the tautological by directly confronting Leuchter and the whole Holocaust denial mob. What he does, and he does it brilliantly, is show Leuchter's journey from the merely odd to the truly malevolent. Leuchter portrays himself as an innocent "scientist" who was destroyed-no job, no wife, no prospects-because he spoke the truth. Mr. Morris does not treat Leuchter with any undeserved sympathy but shows him for what he is, for what he has become-the Banality of Evil, and a
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>Willing Executioner.
frustrating documentary
Because it doesn't know what it wants to be. First they show you Mr. Leuchter in a good light--who goes about redesigning electric chairs (and other ways we have of putting death row inmates to death) in order to lessen their suffering, etc., while they are being put to death... I call that compassionate and humane... Fine. But then, out of the blue, this same individual, Mr. Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., is on his way to Auschwits, the notorious Nazi death camp, to either prove or disprove that the gas chambers ever existed.
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>What is deplorable--from the get-go--is this guy's lame gathering of evidence, the disrespectful way he goes about gathering bits of mortar, brick, etc., without anyone'es approval (this is a shrine, after all) and then, further adding insult to injury, he has these samples "tested" in a most shoddy way... And this, ultimately, is supposed to be irrefutable evidence that the Nazis never gassed millions of innocent people.
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>I don't get it.
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>You want some idea what went on in those hell-holes called the concentration camps? all you have to do is pick up a book or two. Read DEATH DEALER--THE MEMOIRS OF THE SS KOMMANDANT AT AUSCHWITZ, or FIVE CHIMNEYS--A WOMAN SURVIVOR'S TRUE STORY OF AUSCHWITZ. I could go on.
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>I give it two stars, out of respect for Errol Morris, for making THE THIN BLUE LINE. That was one remarkable
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>doc--as it saved an innocent man's life--by taking him off death row (for having been put there for a crime he never committed to begin with.)
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