Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Ol' Dirty Bastard, Akinyele and Blowfly deliver sextastic anthems, freaknasty odes to oral sex and chocolate dildos for Christmas.
By Jon Caramanica
[01/14/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Caravana Cubana, a handful of seasoned island music vets, out-spice "Buena Vista Social Club."
By Jason Ferguson
[01/13/00]

Column
King of "Kings"
With dark horse Oscar candidate "Three Kings" trotted out for another showing, director David O. Russell talks about Michael Jackson, visual studies and George Clooney's Cary Grant turn.
By Michael Sragow
[01/13/00]

Music
Put your cat clothes on
Between the Beatles' flashy suits and Madonna's damn-the-torpedoes bustier, "Rock Style" examines the finest frippery in music.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[01/12/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
On the "Magnolia" soundtrack, beleaguered singer-songwriter Aimee Mann comes into full bloom.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[01/12/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Leuchter is another of the eccentric characters who fascinate Morris, but unlike the mole-rat expert, robot designer and lion tamer Morris portrayed in "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," Leuchter's journey goes beyond the realm of pathetic or quixotic obsession into ugliness and darkness. Maybe this story about a lonely American engineer with no evident ideology who became a lightning rod for Holocaust revisionism can best be described as a fable about the evil of banality.

Mr. Death: The rise and fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Directed by Errol Morris

Long before he became a hero to neo-Nazis around the world by "proving" there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, Leuchter (which he pronounces LOOT-cher, rather than the Germanic LOYCH-ter) was already a morbid oddball. A small-time engineer whose father had been a Massachusetts prison guard, Leuchter had carved out a professional niche as a designer and refurbisher of execution equipment. As gruesome as this may be, Leuchter is quite correct in saying that if our society is to practice capital punishment someone will have to do it. He initially became involved, he insists, out of humanitarian concern, upon learning that the antiquated electric chairs used in North Carolina and Tennessee "normally resulted in torture prior to death." If the current is insufficient or incorrectly administered, it might take 35 or 40 minutes for a condemned person to die. On the other hand, as Leuchter reports in his thick Boston accent, too much voltage may be used, in which case "the meat comes off the executee like meat off a cooked chicken."

His success with electric chairs led to contracts for automatic lethal-injection devices (so that a doctor would not have to administer the injections) and even for gallows. As Leuchter wryly points out, there is no connection between these devices beyond the fact that they're used to kill people. But as state after state reinstituted the death penalty and began to apply it, authorities needed someone to call who could build efficient, modern equipment that got the job done. "It's not a major market," as Leuchter says, but it was his. He is proud of his fair pricing (no more than a 20 percent markup!) and of his innovative design features: automobile-style safety belts, to make corpse removal easier; a drip pan under the chair, to minimize embarrassment and keep highly conductive urine off the floor of the death chamber.

By the time Leuchter got a call from the lawyers for Ernst Zündel, a neo-Nazi facing trial in Canada for disseminating Holocaust-denial propaganda, he had already become a low-rent entrepreneurial answer to the German engineers who designed the death camps -- a practical-minded man who saw a need and filled it. As he blandly explains for Morris' camera, there is no difference between a life-support machine and an electric chair, except that if the former fails you die and if the latter fails you live. Not even the most ardent opponent of the death penalty would argue that building machines for the execution of criminals is morally equivalent to designing genocide camps, but from an engineering standpoint, the only differences are questions of scale and degree.

When the movie suddenly touches down at Auschwitz for a few minutes before leaving again it runs the risk of being dwarfed by what it encounters there. Certainly the comic-horrific scenes in which Leuchter -- swaddled in goofy winter clothes like a science nerd on a fifth-grade field trip -- bumbles around the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria, hammering illicit "samples" out of the walls while intoning a pseudo-scientific narration to the camera, are not easy to tolerate. But why should they be? Morris is making the point, I think, that Leuchter is so incapable of relating to other people that the ruins of an extermination camp -- like the electric chairs and lethal-injection machines he designs -- are for him nothing more than an engineering problem, a forensic puzzle.

Next page | Auschwitz was "kind of spooky"