Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Page #8

it was a nightmare.

He had a job offer

from California.

He thought

I was going with him.

I told him that

he could give his speeches,

he could do whatever he wanted,

but I would not be there.

And I told him

I went to a lawyer.

And I explained to him that yes,

I could get a divorce and yes,

you have to leave here.

I don't want you here.

And he hemmed and hawed

and whatever, but he left,

like, a week later.

When he left,

he took his phone.

The other phone

was being shut off.

The gas and electric

was being shut off.

And that was how he left.

If I never saw him again,

that'd be fine.

[ Leuchter ]

The guy that brought me

out there didn't have any money.

He wound up

with everybody suing him

and all kinds of stuff.

So I said, "Well,

I'm not getting anywhere. "

I was locked out

of my hotel room three times.

It's kind of tough when they

take your car away and they

drop you off on the freeway.

You're looking around trying

to figure out how the hell

you get back to your apartment.

Then you find you got this

super-size doorknob on your knob

so you can't get the key in,

and all your clothes

and razor's inside.

I had my car taken away from me

while I was driving it

on the freeway.

I had another car taken away

in a garage.

These are rental cars

that had been assigned to me.

It's pretty tough when

you're out in the middle

of nowhere all by yourself.

[ Irving ]

He's been destroyed

as a human being.

He's had

his marriage destroyed.

He's had his life destroyed.

I frankly am surprised

he didn't go and commit suicide,

jump under a train.

He saw everything

he had built up in his own

quiet, humble way destroyed...

by these people

he had never met,

whom he had offended.

All he did was

take the bucket and spade

and go over to Auschwitz...

and come back

with the samples.

And that was an act

of criminal simplicity.

He had no idea

of what he was blundering into.

He wasn't putting

his name on the line

because he had no name.

He came from nowhere,

and he went back to nowhere.

[ Leuchter ]

Of course I'm not

an anti-Semite.

I have a lot of friends

that are Jewish.

I've lost Jewish friends, too,

because of what's happened.

I bear no ill will

to any Jews anyplace,

whether they're

in the United States

or abroad.

I bear a great deal of ill will

to those people that have come

after me,

those people who have

persecuted and prosecuted me.

But that's got nothing

to do with them being Jewish.

That only has to do

with the fact that

they've been interfering...

with my right to live, think,

breathe and earn a living.

As far as being

a revisionist--

At this point, I'm not

an official revisionist,

but I guess

I'm a reluctant revisionist.

If my belief that there

were no gas chambers...

at Auschwitz,

Birkenau and Majdanek...

makes me a revisionist,

then so be it.

They've expressed

their unquestioned intent

of destroying me...

simply because

I testified in Canada,

not because I have

any other affiliation with

any anti-Semitic organization,

not because I'm affiliated

with any Nazi or neo-Nazi

organization.

I have no work.

I haven't sold a piece of

equipment in almost three years.

And I have no idea

if this situation

is gonna change.

[ Man ]

Have you ever thought

that you might be wrong?

Or do you think that

you could make a mistake?

No, I'm past that.

When I attempted to turn

those facilities into

gas execution facilities...

and was unable to,

I made a decision

at that point

that I wasn't wrong.

And perhaps

that's why I did it.

At least

it cleared my mind.

So I know that

I left no stone unturned.

I did

everything possible...

to substantiate and prove the

existence of the gas chambers,

and I was unable to.

In 1957,

I actually had the opportunity

for the first time

to sit in the chair.

There's a legend

that goes with the chair...

relative to prison personnel

and their families.

There was, um,

a youngster,

much the same age as I was

when I sat in the chair,

whose father was a guard

at the institution,

who toured the institution

and who sat

in the electric chair.

Some ten or twelve years later,

he was executed

in that same chair...

for the commission of a murder

during an armed robbery.

And so the legend grew...

that prison officials

shouldn't allow their children

to sit in the electric chair.

I kind of sat in the chair

waiting for something to happen.

But some 20 years later,

I wound up making

execution equipment,

instead of being the person

that the execution equipment

was used on.

So, maybe the legend

got turned around,

and maybe we created

a new legend,

and some good came

out of it after all.

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