Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

This is a movie in which the protagonist appears to be little more than an eccentric and (at first) "humane" engineer of killing machines. By the end of the movie they are seen as much less - or much more.

I've been over and over, back and forth through my vocabulary and my thesaurus, trying to find just the right qualifying word to accurately describe what Fred Leuchter Jr. does for a living.

Never a director to focus on anything but the utterly fascinating, Errol Morris' documentaries over the past few years lay a foundation for a consistently excellent body of work. His love of the eccentric and the condemned prove fascinating viewing, but what makes his films so utterly gripping is his objectivity.

Delousing chambers have more traces of cyanide because it takes a LOT MORE hydrogen cyanide over a much longer period of time to kill lice than it does to kill human beings. Because human beings aspirate much more than lice, it takes much less of the gas to kill a human being and in a much shorter time.

Fred A. Leuchter is a man whom you want to despise, to hate with all your being.

In recent months, I've really grown to love documentaries--having seen some truly exceptional ones. As a psychology teacher, these sort of films make great fodder for discussions with my students.

Here's the major lie by omission - the film and interview of the chemist conveniently excludes the fact that Leuchter also took brick samples from the delousing chambers at the camps in the exact same way as he did from the alleged homicidal gas chambers. His delousing chamber samples registered extremely high amounts of cyanide, proving that the cyanide is in fact easily detectable, even when diluted due to the crushing of large samples.

"Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A.

This documentary is a classic study of the tragedy that invariably occurs when religious dogma collides with actual facts. Normally the two rarely cross paths, because people are loath to submit cherished beliefs to the light of objective analysis.