Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Page #4

Synopsis: Documentary about Fred Leuchter, an engineer who became an expert on execution devices and was later hired by revisionist historian Ernst Zundel to "prove" that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Leuchter published a controversial report confirming Zundel's position, which ultimately ruined his own career. Most of the footage is of Leuchter, puttering around execution facilities or chipping away at the walls of Auschwitz, but Morris also interviews various historians, associates, and neighbors.
Director(s): Errol Morris
Production: Lions Gate Releasing
  1 win & 8 nominations.
 
IMDB:
7.5
Metacritic:
78
Rotten Tomatoes:
100%
PG-13
Year:
1999
91 min
151 Views


Gas chamber,

within three or four minutes.

And with the gallows

it doesn't matter,

because you're being dropped

almost immediately after being

brought onto the scaffold.

None of the procedures require

that somebody lay on a gurney

for 35 minutes...

looking at a ceiling.

You have to have the man

immobile.

He has to be unable to move,

or else he's gonna damage

his arm with the catheter.

But you certainly can

make it more comfortable.

You could put him in

a contoured chair like they have

in the dentist's office.

Then at least

he'd be sitting up.

You could give him

a television, music,

some pictures on the wall...

rather than put him

in a concrete room.

That's not humane.

Essentially, the states

talk with each other.

We immediately got Illinois,

and we got Delaware.

They had a hanging problem

that they totally were not

able to deal with.

They had a gallows

that had been stored

for 25 or 30 years.

They took it out,

they screwed it together

and it fell over.

The only thing left

that was functional were

the hinges for the trap door.

The reasoning here is that

I'd built helmets

for electric chairs,

so I could build

lethal injection machines.

I now built

lethal injection machines,

so I'm now competent

to build a gallows.

And since

I'm building gallows,

I'm also competent

to work on gas chambers...

because I'd done

all of the other three.

What really makes you competent

is the fact that you have

the necessary background,

you do the investigation,

you find out what the problem is

and you solve it.

It's not anything different

than any competent engineer

could do.

The difference is that

it's not a major market.

A lot of people

are not interested...

and are morally opposed

to working on

execution equipment.

They think it's somehow

gonna change them.

As you've probably guessed

by now,

I am a proponent

of capital punishment.

Uh, I'm certainly not

a proponent of capital torture.

We must always remember...

and we must never forget...

the fact that the person

being executed

is a human being.

One of the things

that I've had to deal with...

is the feelings of the people

who are doing the executions.

The guards that work

with the execution equipment...

are generally

the same guards that have

dealt with that inmate...

for the last five,

ten, fifteen,

sometimes twenty years...

while the man

was on Death Row.

The warden

of the institution...

is, in many respects,

the surrogate father...

is, in many respects,

the surrogate father...

of the inmate

who's being executed.

He sees that inmate

maybe five or six times a week.

He's concerned

if the inmate is sick, if

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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