We met at the Inn at Harvard and walked over to Morris’s low-key studio in Cambridge’s Central Square. We settled into comfortable chairs to watch the film. Leuchter’s face filled the screen. He has a high forehead, receding hairline, a long oval pointy face, pasty skin, large heavy black-framed glasses, and a kind of caricatured grinning expression. With his polyester short-sleeved white shirt and tightly hitched pants, he looked like he should have a plastic pocket holder full of pens and a bunch of keys on his belt. He reminded me of the classic nerd, not a man whose junk science had caused neo-Nazis and deniers to rejoice.
Leuchter proceeded to tell his story on film. His father worked for the Massachusetts prison system. By the age of four Leuchter was already accompanying him to visit “all the cell areas, including the death-house area.” By his own admission, Leuchter attributed his decision to become an “execution expert” to these father-son excursions. Leuchter drank forty cups of coffee a day, smoked six packs of cigarettes, and hung out at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Malden, Massachusetts. He was attached not only to coffee but to a waitress, Carolyn, whom he had recently married.
Leuchter had an old electric chair in the basement of his home. With the cameras rolling, he strapped himself into the chair, put on the helmet through which the electrical current traveled, looked straight into the camera, and smiled. Leuchter excitedly described how the lethal injection system he had designed might be enhanced. Rather than strapping prisoners to a gurney and forcing them to stare at the ceiling, “you could put him in a contoured chair like they have in a dentist’s office. . . . You could give him a television, you could give him music, you could put some pictures on the wall.” As Leuchter described this user-friendly form of execution, the film cut to a framed Currier and Ives winter scene. Morris, apparently enjoying his “editorial” comment, laughed aloud. He clearly thought that Leuchter possessed the three ingredients he considered key for his films: “sad, sick, and funny.”8 I agreed with the sad and the sick. I found it hard to think of him as funny.
In February 1988, Leuchter had gone to Poland to investigate the “alleged gas chambers” and make a movie about his findings. Zündel paid $40,000 for Leuchter, Carolyn, a cameraman, a translator, and a draftsman to make the trip, which also served as Leuchter and Carolyn’s honeymoon. Morris considered calling his movie Honeymoon in Auschwitz but eventually dropped that in favor of Mr. Death. Morris included portions of Leuchter’s film in his documentary. At both Auschwitz and Birkenau, Leuchter chiseled chunks of concrete from the walls of the gas chambers. He also took samples from the walls of the delousing facility in which clothes and objects were fumigated. Leuchter intended to compare the amount of gas residue in each facility. He haphazardly stuffed plastic Baggies filled with chunks from the walls into the front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. As he gathered his samples, he kept talking to the camera. “Sort of like Mr. Wizard,” Morris laughingly observed, referring to the somewhat goofy television character who taught many American children science.
Leuchter smuggled the samples out of Poland wrapped in his dirty underwear. Back in Malden he asked a chemical lab to test them for HCN (hydrogen cyanide). The lab found there was more gas residue in the delousing chamber samples than in the gas chamber samples. Based on this, Leuchter concluded that no humans were gassed at Auschwitz. “Only lice,” he declared, “were killed there.”9
Leuchter had made a number of fundamental mistakes that destroyed the validity of his conclusions. In the fall of 1944, as the Soviet forces approached Auschwitz, the Germans blew up the gas chambers in order to camouflage their genocidal activities. The piles of rubble had been exposed to years of rain, snow, sun, and mud. The water-soluble HCN residue on the chambers’ exposed walls and floors had been severely diluted by the time Leuchter arrived with his chisel, Baggies, and running commentary. Despite this exposure to the elements, Leuchter found some HCN traces, indicating that there must have once been far higher levels. But Leuchter made an even more basic mistake. He assumed that because he found higher levels of HCN residue in the chambers for delousing clothing and objects than in the homicidal gas chambers, humans were not killed in the latter. But vermin are far more resistant to cyanide than humans. Therefore, in order to kill them, far higher concentrations of gas are needed for substantially longer periods of time. Therefore, there should be more gas residue in a clothes delousing chamber than in a homicidal gas chamber. Furthermore, when humans are packed tightly into a room—such as they were in the gas chambers—lower amounts of the gas will kill them more rapidly than in other circumstances. Given these conditions, it is surprising that he found any gas residue at all in the homicidal gas chambers.
I kept waiting for the film to explicate the fallacies of Leuchter’s arguments. I waited for him to note that according to Alabama assistant attorney general, Ed Carnes, Leuchter was a “self-styled [emphasis added] ‘execution technology’ expert,” whose views on the gas-chamber process were not only “unorthodox” but who also would “make money on both sides of the fence” in capital murder cases.10 If a state refused to hire him to work on their execution system, Leuchter would testify in court on behalf of an inmate in that state that the system might malfunction.11 I knew that Morris generally does not introduce other voices into his films and lets the main characters speak for themselves. Still, I assumed he would not let these claims go unchallenged. I waited in vain. When the film ended, Morris turned to me with an expectant look. Without hesitating, I blurted out, “Your film is in trouble. In fact, it’s dangerous. Viewers might assume you’re espousing Leuchter’s views.” Morris’s eyes darkened. I explained that while critics might understand Leuchter was a nut, innocent viewers would not. Morris, possibly stung by the strength of my objections, dismissed my concerns and assured me that everyone would grasp how eccentric Leuchter was. I doubted he was correct. I suggested that he ask Robert Jan van Pelt, an expert on Auschwitz, to elucidate the absurdity of Leuchter’s claims. Van Pelt had just coauthored a major study of the history of Auschwitz. He might rescue Morris from a potential disaster.
I knew that my response was governed, in great measure, by my own situation. I felt entrapped in a legal nightmare, while Morris considered Leuchter’s claims as sort of weirdly funny. One of America’s most talented documentarians was, however inadvertently, helping Irving make his case. As I walked to my hotel, I felt very lonely.
A CONSPIRACY OF GOOD
My response to Morris was probably exacerbated by something unrelated to his film. Right before coming to Cambridge, Anthony had called to say that the case had taken already far longer than anyone had anticipated. James and Anthony could no longer work pro bono. They were willing to work at reduced fees, but needed substantial amounts to pay for experts, researchers, and other staff, particularly if we went to trial. When I asked Anthony to define “substantial,” he somewhat reluctantly said probably more than a million dollars. My heart sank. Anthony promised to prepare a budget and I resolved, in good southern tradition, not to think about it until it arrived.
A few days later, my ability to ignore this issue abruptly ended as I was leaving my home for a weekend seminar organized by the Wexner Heritage Foundation. I was climbing into the taxi to go to the airport when a FedEx truck pulled up in front of my home. The driver ran over and handed me a large envelope from Anthony. I took out a multipaged document. I quickly turned to the last page and blanched. The bottom line read $1.6 million.
I generally loved participating in the Wexner Foundation’s activities and had been looking forward to the weekend as a bit of an escape from the case. The retailing legend, Leslie Wexner, had created the foundation to educate Jewish communal leaders. Wexner, together with his wife Abigail, believed that Jewish life needed leaders who were both educated in Jewish history and tradition and knew how to think “outside the box.” Adhering to Leslie’s commercial philosophy that “retail is detail,” the foundation’s programs were meticulously executed and were models of adult education
. I had been teaching for the foundation for over ten years. At this seminar I was scheduled to participate in a series of panels about strategies for lessening interdenominational Jewish strife. That topic quickly faded into the background as word of my predicament quickly spread. Participants inundated me with questions.
The founding president of the foundation, Rabbi Herbert Friedman, a tall man with an Einstein-like shock of white hair, pulled me aside. Friedman had been a United States Army chaplain during World War II. He became profoundly troubled by the myriad of Jewish survivors languishing in Europe—some were being housed in former concentration camps. Many wanted to enter Palestine but the British refused them permission. Friedman commandeered American army trucks and, with the help of Jewish soldiers, transported survivors to Italian ports where they boarded ships for Palestine—among them the SS Exodus—and tried to outrun the British blockade. After the war he went on to a distinguished career in Jewish organizational life.
Friedman, sounding a bit miffed that he had heard about my case via the grapevine and not directly from me, demanded a briefing on the case. He immediately asked how I was planning to raise the money. I told him that I had no idea. “I’ve always been a giver, never a recipient. I never imagined I would need to solicit funds for my own needs.” He peered down at me and declared, in a slightly condescending tone, which, had it come from anyone else, I would have resented. “It’s time to get organized.” He then added, “Irving set his sights on you, but it’s the entire Jewish community and historical truth that he is aiming at.”
And then Friedman took charge. He called his long-time colleague and benefactor, Leslie Wexner, and briefed him. Les responded in his characteristically straightforward fashion. He requested background material and after closely scrutinizing it, told Friedman, “This is not Deborah’s issue. It’s our issue.” He then relayed a message to me that I was not to worry about funds. He would give whatever it takes. He and Abigail had only one prerequisite. I must have the best defense. After determining that Anthony was, indeed, at the top of his field and would mount an aggressive defense, Les Wexner committed $200,000 for the fight. Soon a collaboration developed between Wexner and Steven Spielberg, whose own Shoah Foundation was deeply engaged in taking survivors’ testimonies. This collaboration resulted in the effective solicitation of a number of $100,000 dollar contributors. Bill Lowenberg, a survivor who lived in San Francisco, whose daughter—a participant in the Wexner programs—had briefed him on the case, called Friedman. He said he would raise 20 percent of the costs and began to contact members of the Bay Area Jewish community. Ernie Michel, a survivor who lived in New York, took out his Rolodex and began to call other survivors. Other people pitched in to help. All this was done quietly and without any publicity or fanfare.
When I saw Les Wexner a few weeks later, I tried to thank him. He rather impatiently brushed off my words of gratitude. “This may be the most important check I have ever written.” He then spoke, almost in awe, about the high-mindedness of the other donors. They sought no recognition. They gave to protect the historical record. Rarely, Les mused, had he seen such unselfishness. “They are glad to have the opportunity to nail this guy’s lies and distortions.” Subsequently, when I saw some of the other donors, they, too, brushed off my thanks and urged me to mount as strong a defense as possible. It was a mind-boggling experience.
Friedman asked David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), to house a defense fund. The committee’s board agreed and then voted to make a major contribution to the fund. The Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center stepped forward to contribute. The AJC’s Harris assigned Ken Stern—the organization’s specialist on antisemitism and extremism—to assist me in any way he could. Ken, a lawyer, immediately established contact with Anthony and James. In an unprecedented display of organizational restraint, none of these organizations publicized what they were doing. Within weeks other contributions began to arrive. One person quietly called another. Some of the donations were substantial; many were quite small. Most came from Jews. Some came from non-Jews. I did not solicit funds. Wexner had stressed in no uncertain terms, “Our job is to ensure that you have the means to fight. Your job is to fight.” When someone called the Wexners to suggest that I follow a particular strategy, they were told in no uncertain terms, “It’s between Deborah and her lawyers. She has the best. Let them do their job.”
The case was slowly taking over my universe. As Anthony and James had warned, preparing the discovery was very onerous. I had to scour my files for everything that might, however obliquely, relate to David Irving. Together with one overworked research assistant, I reviewed the thousands of pieces of paper I had accumulated while writing the book. Files that I thought I would never seriously examine again were piled high on my desk. Books, some with the yellow Post-its I had used while writing Denying the Holocaust still attached to them, were shipped to England. Anthony and James decided that, in order to be able to assure the court that I had fully complied with the discovery process, an American lawyer should review my work. Joe Beck, an Atlanta libel attorney, volunteered to help. I assumed that he would perfunctorily review my work. Once again my assumption was wrong. Joe spent hours with me inspecting my files to ensure that I had sent all relevant material to London.
Then we had to select our expert witnesses. Who, I wondered, would do this tedious job? There seemed to me nothing less gratifying for a researcher than tracing footnotes to see if they told the truth. Anthony reassured me that it was a challenge that would intrigue academics. Moreover, he reminded me, we were planning to pay them well, approximately £100—close to $160—an hour. Worried about the mounting expenses, I observed that historians rarely earn that much money. Anthony told me, with a slight note of reproach in his voice, that this was what witnesses in a commercial case received. “Should we pay historians any less?” Though I was embarrassed by Anthony’s question, I nonetheless was about to suggest that maybe we should, when Anthony added, “I want them at my beck and call. If I need something from them in a hurry, I want them to make our case the highest priority. At £100 an hour, they will.” I dropped the issue.
Together with Penguin’s lawyers, Anthony, James, and I compiled a list of potential experts. We prepared a list of those of Irving’s claims that the experts would address, including that Hitler had no role in the Final Solution; that the murder of Jews on the Eastern Front was not sanctioned by Nazi authorities; that there was no overall plan to murder the Jews of Europe; and that gas chambers were not used to murder vast numbers of Jews at Auschwitz and elsewhere. We also needed a lead witness to conduct a historiographic analysis of Irving’s writings on the Holocaust and to determine if he observes the generally accepted standards of historical scholarship. Did he honestly cite his sources? Did he tell his readers about evidence that disagreed with his arguments? Did he make it easy for other researchers to check his sources?
We selected Professor Richard Evans of Cambridge as our lead historical witness. Evans, a specialist on German history, would conduct the historiographic analysis of Irving’s writings on the Holocaust. We decided that he should not limit himself to only Holocaust-related topics but should pick one non-Holocaust topic in order to determine if it was accurate and reliable. Evans decided to analyze Irving’s writings on the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. We considered including another non-Holocaust topic, Irving’s writings about Sir Winston Churchill. I thought this a fruitful avenue to pursue because I suspected that Irving’s anti-Churchill fulminations would not sit well with a British jury. We turned to Sir Martin Gilbert, but when he proved unavailable, we decided Evans’s review of Irving’s writings on Dresden would suffice.
We asked Professor Robert Jan van Pelt, the architectural historian I had recommended to Errol Morris, to examine Irving’s claims regarding Auschwitz. A Dutchman, van Pelt was a professor at the University of Waterloo’s Architecture School in Toronto and was emerging as one o
f the world’s experts on Auschwitz. I also suggested that we ask Professor Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Battalion 101 and an expert on the origins of the Final Solution, to prepare a report challenging Irving’s assertions that Jews, who were shot after the Germans invaded Soviet territory in the summer of 1941, were victims of rogue actions, not of a coordinated system authorized by the highest echelons of the Third Reich. We also asked him to submit a report on the gas vans and on Operation Reinhard, the killing of Jews in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Richard Evans asked Peter Longerich, a German-born specialist on Hitler who now taught at the University of London, to analyze Hitler’s role in the Final Solution. Because our objective was not to prove that the Holocaust had happened but that what I wrote about Irving was correct, we asked the experts to compile the evidence that a fair-minded, objective historian would use to reach conclusions about the Holocaust.
But we also needed political scientists. In Denying the Holocaust, I had argued that Irving’s Holocaust denial was linked to his extremist political views. In other words, he did not just happen to be a denier, who also happened to be an antisemite and racist. The two—denial and political extremism—were linked. He engaged in the former in order to promote the latter. We asked Professor Hajo Funke of Berlin, a German specialist on extremism, to examine Irving’s links to the German radical right and neo-Nazi fringe.
LONDON 1998: EMINENT LAWYERS AND SKEPTICAL EXPERTS
In early 1998, I flew to London to consult with Anthony and James. Mishcon de Reya’s offices are located in Bloomsbury, home of London’s most popular tourist attraction, the British Museum. Concerned about depleting the defense fund, I asked Michaela, Anthony’s secretary, to find a reasonable hotel. The one she chose had clearly seen better days. I quickly headed to Mishcon’s offices. I cut through Bloomsbury Square and walked through an arcade of shops, used-book stores, and restaurants. It opened onto the commercial bustle of High Holborn and Southampton Row, where Mishcon de Reya occupied a small seven-story building. The offices were modest and functional.
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