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Yesterday I watched a documentary I know I watched before, but either way that didn’t stop me from watch it again. Mr. Death directed by Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) is a cinematic portrait of the life and career of the infamous American execution device designer and holocaust denier Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. The film is in essence two parts one dealing with Leuchter’s work with designing and building equipment used in executions. Although I am not an advocate of capital punishment I still found this part both fascinating and funny, I guess unintentionally on Leuchter’s part. The second part of the movie is different, as it deals with going to Auschwitz to gather evidence for his testimony as an expert in repairing and building execution devices in the libel trial of the revisionist Ernst Zundel. Zundel was on trial for publishing a document entitled “Did Six Million Really Die?”, which the government of Canada argued was published with deliberate lies about the Nazi execution of Jews. The second half is horrible, not in the sense that it is bad, but rather how when the trial took place in the late 1980s people would still be denying something as concrete as the holocaust. It is an interesting movie, at least I think so.
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