Mr. Death is a stylized documentary that deals with the life and work of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a US Federal Court qualified expert in execution technology. On the basis of his qualifications, in 1988 Leuchter was commissioned by German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zundel to conduct the first thorough forensic examination of the alleged Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
After Leuchter testified that the alleged facilities were not — and could not have been — used for mass extermination, Jewish activists ruined his life. Leuchter comes across just as straightforward and guileless on film as he is in real life. As a result, some viewers of earlier versions at the Sundance Festival, the Toronto Film Festival and Harvard University began to question the Holocaust extermination stories they’d been told, while others suspected that Morris himself might have been converted to Holocaust revisionism.
At the eleventh hour, Errol Morris re-edited the film in an effort to emphasize his anti-revisionist point of view. Character assassination aside, the question remains as to whether or not Leuchter’s findings regarding the alleged Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau are correct.
