Tales of an Accidental Nazi



Off kilter: Execution "expert" Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Errol Morris looks inside the mind of the Holocaust denier who meant no harm.

by Sam Adams

In the documentary A Brief History of Errol Morris, the director of such off-kilter documentaries as The Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven reveals that his interview technique consists of feigning fascination while studiously ignoring what his subject is saying. The idea, he explains, is to say as little as possible, so that the interviewee is free to structure their own monologue without interference from the questioner. Paying attention, it turns out, only tempts you to interject, which ruins the flow of ideas.

Of course, like much of what Morris says or does, the statement is a dramatic exaggeration verging on a put-on. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the latest in Morris’ catalog of accomplished, idiosyncratic films, begins with an image that is part monster movie, part Grand Guignol. Under the opening credits, we see a silhouetted Leuchter seated inside what looks like a giant birdcage, illuminated only by the coruscating waves of blue electricity which run up and down the cage’s bars. We soon learn that Leuchter is a self-proclaimed expert on the design and installation of electric chairs, and that this awkward, giddy man is positively gleeful at the prospect of designing better and better ways to put people to death. But if he’s more than a little bit mad scientist, Leuchter also falls victim to his own arrogance, and puts an end to his career as surely as he’s helped to end the lives of so many others.

These opening images manage to evoke at once Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory and the specter of Leuchter being executed in one of his own electric chairs. That’s part of the special genius of Errol Morris’ movies, and illustrates the extent to which he believes that artifice can be as truthful as cinema vérité. Morris is far from your average documentarian — in fact, he prefers to call his movies "non-fiction films." In the last dozen years, he’s remapped the genre’s boundaries, from the overlapping, contradictory reenactments of The Thin Blue Line to the elaborate dreamscapes of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. When Morris overdoses on technique (as he does in Fast, Cheap) it can seem as if his subjects disappear beneath a flood of baroque imagery, their own sensibilities shredded in pursuit of an intellectualized goal. But when the balance is as perfect as it is in Mr. Death, the imagery enriches the interviews a thousandfold, and the result is a unique hybrid of documentary power and fictional reverie.

Reached at his studio in Cambridge, MA, where he’s furiously editing shows for his upcoming Bravo series First Person, Morris eagerly wades into the thicket of issues raised by Mr. Death, which begins as a story of one man’s obsession and evolves into a tale of monstrous amorality and Holocaust denial. As an expert on execution systems, Leuchter agrees to testify as a (paid) expert witness for Ernst Zündel, a German national living in Canada who is brought to trial for publishing neo-Nazi literature. ("Inciting racial hatred" is a felony in Canada, whose free speech laws are considerably less protective than our own.) As an expert gas chamber designer (the United States is the only nation that still executes people with gas), Leuchter is sent to Auschwitz to collect information on Zündel’s claim that the buildings there were only used for holding prisoners, and not execution. Leuchter eventually concludes that, due to what he considers shoddy workmanship and inadequate design, the bunkers at Auschwitz could not possibly have been used to execute large numbers of people. Mr. Death cannily selects excerpts from a videotape which shows Leuchter traipsing round Auschwitz with an eager smile on his face, clandestinely chipping away at walls and securing samples in plastic sandwich bags with a kind of naughty thrill.

Like Morris’ manufactured opening, those videotaped images are central to Mr. Death, so much so that Morris amplifies them with recreated close-ups, some using a Leuchter stand-in, some using Leuchter himself. (The recreation involved building an Auschwitz "set" in a Boston studio.) While much of the attention lavished on Mr. Death has focused on the factual evaluation of Leuchter’s claims — claims which the film neatly demolishes — Morris is quick to point out that the film is, at least in part, an attempt to understand and evaluate the "absurdist dreamscape" of Leuchter’s mind.

"In Fred’s case," Morris explains, "I don’t think I can identify one mental landscape because there are so many of them; it’s like talking about one picture in a kaleidoscope. There’s such a mixture of [Fred’s] self-images in the course of this movie, and what’s interesting is that very few of these self-images square with our image of Fred. The most radical disjunction is in Auschwitz, where you have Fred disappearing into this hole in Crematorium Number 2, and describing it like he’s a Hardy Boy. The way he talks about it, this could come out of some book called Mystery of Skull Island. He seems completely oblivious to where he is."

Like The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death is an exploration of the psychology of denial, or as Morris puts it, "Why do people believe wrong things, even in the face of overwhelming evidence?" What links the films, he says, is "the idea that somehow error, not certainty, is our clue to understanding reality."



	Going underground: Errol Morris digs for the truth at Auschwitz.

"I would have these discussions when I was working on The Thin Blue Line with my editor Brad Fuller," Morris recalls. "He would say, ‘Of course the Dallas police must have known Randall Adams was innocent and David Harris was guilty.’ And my answer is ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I think that they truly believed Adams was guilty. And they probably continue to believe Adams is guilty despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Just as Fred Leuchter still believes that he’s right about his investigation — or if you prefer, his pseudo-investigation — of Auschwitz, even though he’s clearly wrong."

It seems odd at first to hear Morris speak so unequivocally, since his films so flamboyantly reject vérité stylings and persistently question the very idea of truth, right down to its epistemological roots. But Morris, who famously worked as a private investigator in between films in the mid-’80s, clearly sees truth as immutable, if sometimes elusive. "Either Randall Adams killed that police officer or he didn’t. Either Jews were gassed at Auschwitz or they weren’t — and the overwhelming evidence is that they were."

To that end, Mr. Death breaks with Morris’ subjective tradition and introduces expert witnesses who testify to the bankruptcy of Leuchter’s science. While some discredit themselves by hysterically labeling Leuchter an anti-Semite (there is no evidence that he is), the historian Robert Jan van Pelt eloquently explains the flaws in Leuchter’s research and brings an appropriate note of moral outrage to the proceedings. (Morris also interviews the chemist who tested the samples Leuchter brought back, who explains that because Leuchter didn’t tell him where the samples were from or why they were being tested, the analyses performed were not the correct ones, and the results are basically useless.)

Such an approach seems out of character for Morris, who in The Thin Blue Line re-enacted every version of the crime except the correct one. In fact, Morris originally cut a version of Mr. Death which featured only Leuchter, lacking not only the other interviews but also the crucial footage shot during Morris’ trip to Auschwitz. What convinced him to change the film was that, to his great surprise, people were coming out of the theater believing that the film supported Leuchter, or worse, believing Leuchter himself. Though he doesn’t say so, that moment seems to have prompted Morris to reexamine his approach, and probably led to the artistic breakthrough that Mr. Death represents. Even The Thin Blue Line seemed to deal with the truth cavalierly, as if the reenactments were a postmodern joke at the expense of the Dallas police department. But Mr. Death has more moral weight and complexity than any of Morris’ films since Gates of Heaven (1978), which turned the story of two pet cemeteries into an examination of their owners’ efforts to thwart mortality.

But while Morris acutely appreciates the importance of debunking Leuchter’s claims, he’s wary of Mr. Death being seen solely as a Holocaust document. "One of the problems I have talking about the film — and I have many problems talking about the film, the problems seem almost endless — is that people want all of this factual information about the story, and it seems almost overlooked that it is a story about mental landscapes. It’s a story about many things, but among them a story about how Fred has drifted away from how we see the world, in some very radical way. The denial of the use of poison gas at Auschwitz — if you like, the denial of the Holocaust — is only a small piece of it, although the most glaring piece."

More than anything else, Mr. Death illustrates the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, that Leuchter in his arrogance, childish amorality and creepy charisma was an accident waiting to happen, a directionless soul just waiting to fall under the wrong influence. Unlike Zündel, who "quite clearly is an anti-Semite," Morris sees Leuchter as "the accidental Nazi, the accidental denier, who just stumbled into this situation, like someone wandering into a swamp. His motivation is complex, but it does seem, if you had to come up with a heading for it, this overwhelming vanity of having the opportunity to be the big shot, of getting to play God. Of being the final arbiter of life and death.

"Fred says some really ridiculous things in this movie — I’d be hard-pressed to say which I think is the most ridiculous. But among them is the remark that there is no difference between a life support system and an execution system. Having said this, he offers this clarification: ‘If a life support system fails, you die, and if an execution system fails, you live.’ I think somehow he doesn’t see much of a difference between the two. As if life and death are an afterthought, or maybe they don’t enter into the picture, because the picture is one of control and certainty."

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. opens Friday at Ritz theaters. See Sam Adams’ review.