One of my all time favorites.

Excellent, a Must See

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This is the story about how the world's foremost authority on gas chambers and all methods of executions proved that the Nazi "gas chambers" could have never operated the way historians claim. It completely destroyed his life, proving that Jews control the world. I assume Errol Morris wasn't intending on letting his feelings be known but it seems like he tries hard to make Leuchter look like a bad man and he consistently fails. It's really strange that he would make dramatic recreations of stuff that happened. That has no place in a documentary. The most interesting thing about the movie is that everyone who tries to discredit or insult Leuchter has absolutely no facts or real argument. They can only say things like he "desecrated a holy land" or "wasn't qualified". After the Jewish man who did the tests on the concrete samples and then testified that his results and report were 100% accurate and true, found out what the trial was about, he quickly says that he performed the wrong tests. The only argument anyone can muster is "you have to be crazy to say this". They claim Leuchter just wanted the spotlight but it's very clear that's not true. He was dragged into a court case and provided expert testimony, without bias. The only accurate statement his detractors made is that he came from nowhere and returned to nowhere. It's not only true, it's all he wanted and it doesn't even matter. This movie proves he is right.

"Mr. Death", viewed at Berlin 2000 in the new Potsdmer Platz surroundings, is an astounding feature length interview focusing on Fred Leuchter, an American engineer who used to design execution equipment for the death rows of American prisons. Enlisted by a Holocaust Denial group to 'test' the gas chambers of Auschwitz he found "no traces of cyanide" thus supporting the denial position that the entire Holocaust was a hoax. Confronted by evidence from other scientists indicating that his testing methods were ridiculously superficial – in fact, downright unscientific – he just laughs this off, reveling in his new-found notoriety as a "hero" of the denial movement. More than a political film, this is a razor- sharp case study of a bizarre personality totally out of touch with reality, a walking nut-case whose warped logic is readily accepted by those who want to believe what they want to believe. Frightening, moreover, in how it shows the thinness of the line between credibility and incredibility when it comes to the structuring of public opinion.Many Jews have attacked this film claiming that it makes too strong a case for denial, when in fact the subtle but clear intention of the filmmaker is to point up the twisted logic of the denier. To accomplish this you have to let the subject have his say, but the logic of the insane can sometimes sound uncomfortably compelling – and there's the rub. Director Errol Morris was also the maker of the extraordinary 1991 documentary on Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking entitled "A Brief History of Time". Dr. Death should be required viewing in Yeshivas and Churches alike.

This is a documentary that feels like a compressed news broadcast. Errol Morris, the reason why Werner Herzog ate his shoe, makes this documentary about, well, the rise and fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., also known as Mr. Death. During the 70's and 80's, Mr. Leuchter found himself in a successful niche improving upon and creating new machines to implement capital punishment. Though he was not a licensed technician, he sold blueprints and homemade machines to state penitentiaries as well as acted as a consultant on the lethal machines in prisons across the country. Where Mr. Leuchter went awry was when he was contacted to investigate the truthfulness to the claim that Nazis used lethal gas to exterminate thousands of people at concentration camps in Germany and Poland. His research found him knee deep in the ruins of Auschwitz, taking rock samples off the walls of gas chamber rooms to take back to the United States for arsenic analysis. His research turned up no traces of cyanide in the wall samples nor evidence of the structural integrity of the supposed gas chambers to safely contain the gases. He presented his findings to the trial of Ernst Zundel, a holocaust denier on trial in Canada for publishing documents refuting the Holocaust ever occurred, and was successively outcast from society as a fellow Holocaust denier. Through Morris' ninety minute film, we are shown the relative success of a man quickly sink to the bottom of the world's hating order through the publication of one research project. Mr. Leuchter is portrayed as objectively as possible in this film, sometimes even going to black while his voice continues, but the sheer tenacity of this man makes me grit my teeth with rage when I think of him. His lack of concern for human life and the sufferings of others and his ambivalence towards people as both models of death and financial gain is a horrifying example of what kinds of people do what kinds of things in this world. The movie was well made with nice interludes of beautifully shot slow motion 35mm as well as video footage from trials, video from Leuchter's own research in the tombs of Auschwitz, and the interviews of Leuchter sitting and talking about his work as calmly as a dove coos.

I thought that the brilliance of 'Mr. Death' was that Morris doesn't paint Leuchter as a villain. He seems a rather simple, unaffected character, emotionally retarded; real. While he is right that execution in many of the states is inhumane, he never questions the ethic of capital punishment.Leuchter is peculiarly meticulous, and at the same time, totally unscientific. (Who would seriously undertake an archaeological investigation of such magnitude - which is essentially what he attempts, at Auschwitz, chipping at one of Europe's great/terrible ruins - with such a slim knowledge of what he was doing!?) It is never less than fascinating.If anything, Leuchter seems to get carried away with the celebrity of being involved with Zundel. He goes, in an instant, from being a mere functionary to being a celebrity.On a side point: Holocaust revisionism is not, in itself, wrong. Now, wait a minute, let me speak. Holocaust revisionism is not wrong; it is merely incorrect. Theories can be debated, but not facts. And the historical facts speak clearly of the atrocities carried out by the Nazis during the Second World War.I think that the anger that is often vented at people like Zundel (or even at those who defend their right to speech) is misplaced; whatever his motivations - be they honourable or not - the argument should be rationally conducted. Remember, the onus of proof/disproof is on them; give them enough rope and they will hang themselves.Defaulting to partisan positions - which are positions of choice - and the inability to carry out a clear-headed discussion of points of fact, is itself a form of censorship which plays into the hands of the Zundels of this world. This point is illustrated brilliantly, by Noam Chomsky, in 'Manufacturing Consent', which I would also like to recommend to people who enjoyed 'Mr. Death'.