On the occasion of the 25th anniversary.
The Barnes Review is honored to issue a new, revised edition of the famous “Leuchter Reports.” Fred Leuchter’s expert engineering evidence is overwhelming. There were no execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau or Majdanek. It is clear that the alleged gas chambers at the inspected sites could not have been then, or now, utilized or seriously considered to function as homicidal gas chambers. This is good news for Jews, Gypsies and others, because it means there was no holocaust after all—in a way, this is akin to saving many millions of lives. So why was Leuchter so viciously attacked for reporting his scientific findings?
By Germar Rudolf
In February 1988, Fred Leuchter Jr., in the 1980s America’s only expert for execution technologies, was asked by the defense team of German-Canadian Ernst Zündel to go to the infamous Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps in Poland to verify whether or not the facilities actually used gas to kill inmates by the thousands—if not millions. He agreed to do this and write an expert report about his findings, to be used in a Canadian court of law where Zündel was being tried for “holocaust denial” at that time.
Before Leuchter went to Poland, he was a firm believer in all he had been taught in school and through books and the mass media. But when he looked into the evidence, he changed his mind. A few months later he described his conversion succinctly as follows:
1 “1988 was a very informative and likewise disturbing year. I was appalled to learn that much of what I was taught in school about 20th-century history and World War II was a myth, if not a lie. I was first amazed; then annoyed; then aware: The myth of the holocaust was dead.”
No End of the Myth
Such declarations of victory over the myth were quite frequent in those days immediately after the release of The Leuchter Report. But unfortunately it turned out that the last part of this statement was a “myth” itself, because 25 years later, the holocaust myth is very much alive. As a matter of fact, it can be argued that it has even gained in momentum and persuasive power—but not because the evidence presented for it has become more convincing. It was the increased propaganda output on all levels —media, schools, politics, academia —combined with an ever-increasing societal persecution and illegitimate, though nevertheless “legal,” prosecution of all dissidents that has stifled many Revisionist efforts to correct and destroy this myth.
There are many reasons why Leuchter’s work or any of the others that followed it—this writer’s own expert report included,
2 which followed in his footsteps—did not cause the myth to collapse—or at least not so far. The most important is that the powers that be simply build a major part of their power on the psychological control of the masses by setting the standards for Good and Evil, where “Auschwitz”—or rather the events this moniker stands for—denotes the absolute zero, the absolute evil. Challenging this upsets the way our modern post-WWII world is rigged, so it won’t happen without a fight. Hence we revisionists have been and are being fought fiercely by these powers and their lackeys.
But there is another reason why Leuchter and his ghostwriter Prof. Robert Faurisson did not ring in the end of the current world order, and this lies in the fact that The Leuchter Report simply wasn’t bulletproof. Indeed, it had so many flaws that the opponents of revisionism had a heyday in taking it apart and gloating over its discrepancies and deficiencies.
In all fairness, this had to be expected. After all, Leuchter had no in-depth knowledge of what he was investigating, and he had only a few weeks to get at least a superficial idea about the issues involved. But he did get one thing right: If we want to understand what was going on at Auschwitz, Majdanek and many other places of the claimed judeocide, we need to apply standard forensic methods as they are used in any murder investigation, and Leuchter was the first to do exactly this.
By so doing, he laid his fingers in a festering wound of orthodox historiography, which, up to that point, had been content to merely uncritically regurgitate anecdotal evidence of individuals who claim that they had been there and had seen it all.
Leuchter’s work may have been wanting, but its flaws invited the opponents to deal with it. They made The Leuchter Report a part of their news—bad news, admittedly, but as we all know, there is no good news like bad news—so the Revisionists at least got attention and, for a short while they could no longer be completely hushed up. As a result, many more people pricked up their ears and started listening. Walter Lüftl, in those early post-Leuchter years the president of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers, was one of them. He said to me once that, if you want to stir a public debate on a topic that those in power want to hush up, you have to include a few mistakes in your work so that your enemies will pick it up, drag it into the public arena, and gloat over the mistakes.
That’s what they did with Leuchter’s work, and that was a mistake on their part.
The idea that the holocaust has yet to be the subject of real, forensic, critical scrutiny caught on in many circles around the world. Ever since, a growing number of people have chipped in to widen the scope and scale of such research, to deepen its reach, and to improve and solidify the results.
So the story is far from over. Leuchter started it, and despite all the persecution that resulted from it for him and for those who preceded or followed him, they all keep on fighting. As Fred Leuchter stated five years ago: “The harder the fight the tougher we get.”
Critical Edition
In the summer of 1989, I managed to get a copy of David Irving’s edition of The Leuchter Report. Back in those years my command of the English language was rather inferior, so I had to sit down and translate it with a dictionary in my hands in order to understand what it said. The result both amazed and unsettled me in more than one way. I went through a similar experience as Leuchter has summarized in my initial quote. But I also recognized a number of profound mistakes, and as my knowledge of the topics increased over the months with every book I read about it—foremost Jean-Claude Pressac’s 1989 tome on Auschwitz4
—I realized that this wasn’t the final word on the matter. Hence I started doing my own research.
After many years of my own forensic research and revisionist publishing activities, I decided in 2005 that Leuchter’s work deserved to be re-published in a second edition—all of his four reports, actually. But considering all the weaknesses that had been discovered in his first report on Auschwitz and Majdanek over the years, such a new edition needed to be improved. I didn’t want to mess with the original text, though, which by then had become a historic icon itself. I merely included numerous footnotes with corrections, explanations, and further source material, and added a brief discussion of some of the issues raised by Leuchter.
I am glad that The Barnes Review under the aegis of Willis Carto has now issued a third edition, which has been brought up to date with the current state of research. Equipped with all the improvements of this third, revised edition, The Leuchter Report is as sharp a weapon in the fight for truth as it was 25 years ago.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary, The Barnes Review is honored to issue a new, revised edition of the famous Leuchter Reports.
ENDNOTES:
1 Leuchter, Fred A., “Inside the Auschwitz ‘Gas Chambers,’”The Journal of Historical Review , summer 1989; Vol. 9, No. 2, pp 133-139; see more at www.codoh.com/library/document/863.
2 Rudolf, Germar, and Wolfgang Lambrecht, The Rudolf Report: Expert Report on Chemical and Technical Aspects of the “Gas Chambers” of Auschwitz , 2nd, revised edition, The Barnes Review Book Club, Washington, D.C. 2011, www.holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=2.
3 Leuchter, Fred A., “The 20th Anniversary of The Leuchter Report ,” interview, Smith’s Report, No. 153, September 2008.
4 Pressac, J.-C., Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989; www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/.
