MR. DEATH.

• Author: ROTHENBERG, ROBERT S.
• Position: Review

MR. DEATH UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME VIDEO 92 MINUTES, $19.95

Take an obsessed man and pin him under the merciless lens of the award-winning documentarian Errol Morris, and the results are not pretty. The subtitle of this disturbing video--"The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr."--just about tells it all. One can't condemn a person for making his lifework the refinement of execution devices for states that enforce the death penalty--after all, someone has to do it. It is Leuchter himself who makes the topic off-putting, with his evident glee for the subject, disturbing habit of grinning as he describes the various things that can go wrong with an execution, and general weird appearance.

If that were all there was to Leuchter, viewers could chalk him off as an odd duck with a strange avocation. What led to his downfall, however, was his eager enrolling on the side of Holocaust deniers--the virulent purveyors of revisionist history who claim that there was no such thing as the Holocaust, merely a few thousand slave laborers who "inadvertently" died of typhus and other diseases. The rest of the story, they maintain, is hate propaganda perpetuated by Jews and their supporters.

Recruited by the followers of Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust denier and author of Did Six Million Really Die?, who was on trial in Canada for historical fraud, Leuchter set off for Poland to "prove" that Nazi gas chambers never existed. Despite a complete lack of scientific background, he went ahead and surreptitiously took scrapings and chipped samples from the walls and floors of the ruins of Auschwitz and other death camps and scooped...