Fred A. Leuchter

In fact, the Board of Registration of Professional Engineers and of Land Surveyors licenses the following engineering professionals as of 2017:

Leuchter's work is often presented by Holocaust deniers as scientifically-based evidence for Holocaust denial, even though his research methods and findings having been widely discredited on both scientific and historical grounds. Leuchter and his report are the subject of Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a 1999 feature-length documentary film by Errol Morris.

Leuchter is the subject of a 1999 documentary by Errol Morris, entitled Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Leuchter was arrested in and shortly thereafter deported from the United Kingdom in November 1991. He had been banned from entering the country by the Home Office, thus his entry and presence there were illegal. Leuchter claimed that United States consulate personnel effectively refused him aid. He had been interrupted while giving an invited speech at David Irving's instigation; his talk followed immediately one by Robert Faurisson. Leuchter has blamed criticism of his work on an "international cabal ... those who have unjustly attacked me and violated my rights ... the Klarsfelds, Shapiros, and Kahns of the world".

In 1991 Leuchter faced charges of practicing engineering without a license issued by the Board of Registration of Professional Engineers and of Land Surveyors, which regulates professional engineers, a violation of Massachusetts law. As a result of those charges, Leuchter signed a consent decree with the board, in which he stated that he was not and had never been registered as a professional engineer, despite having represented himself as one. He settled with prosecutors by serving two years of probation and agreeing to stop disseminating documents in which he presented himself as an engineer, including the Leuchter report. In a speech given over a year later, Leuchter claimed that:

Protests were organized outside the courthouse in Canada and near Leuchter's home in Malden, Massachusetts. Despite the bad publicity, he remained active as a capital punishment consultant until 1990, when his lack of qualifications to practice was exposed. In the late 1980s, following the Ernst Zündel trial, he was featured in both The Atlantic Monthly and Primetime Live in items on capital punishment, neither of which mentioned his association with Zündel. Also following his involvement in the Zündel trial, Leuchter began lecturing to Holocaust denial groups, such as the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), about his research and continued belief in the conclusions he testified to in the trial. In a speech to the Eleventh IHR Conference in October, 1992, he said:

On October 24, 1990, The New York Times described him as "self-proclaimed execution expert and manufacturer of death machinery." It quoted Edward A. Brunner, chairman of the anesthesia department at Northwestern University Medical School, as saying Leuchter's lethal injection system would indeed paralyze a condemned criminal with Pavulon, but that far from being humane, the paralysis would merely stop the prisoner from screaming at the "extreme pain in the form of a severe burning sensation" caused by the potassium chloride injection. Potassium chloride is commonly used in judicial execution through lethal injection.

In 1990 Newsweek reported Alabama assistant attorney general Ed Carnes having called Leuchter's views on the gas chamber "unorthodox", and alleging that "Leuchter was running a death row shakedown scheme: if a state didn't purchase Leuchter's services, he would testify at the last minute for the condemned man that the state's death chamber might malfunction." The Associated Press quoted Carnes as claiming that Leuchter made "money on both sides of the fence". In his memorandum to death penalty states, Carnes observed that in Florida and Virginia the federal courts had rejected Leuchter's testimony as unreliable. The court in Florida had found that Leuchter had "misquoted the statements" contained in an important affidavit and had "inaccurately surmised" a crucial premise of his conclusion.

In February 1990, Professor Jan Markiewicz, Director of the Forensic Institute of Cracow, redid the analysis. Markiewicz decided that the Prussian blue test was unreliable because it depended on the acidity of the environment, which was low in the gas chambers. Markiewicz and his team used microdiffusion techniques to test for cyanide in samples from the gas chambers, from delousing chambers, and from living areas elsewhere within Auschwitz. The negative control samples from the living quarters tested negative, while cyanide residue was found in both the delousing chambers and the gas chambers. The amount of cyanide found had a great variability, possibly due to 50 years of exposure to the elements to varying degrees, but even so, the categorical results were that cyanide was found where expected in both the gas chambers and the delousing facilities, and not found in the living quarters, supporting the hypothesis that the gas chambers were exposed to high levels of cyanide like the delousing facilities, and not low levels for routine fumigation, like the living quarters.

Leuchter became internationally known for his testimony in defense of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel in 1988. His study for Zündel's trial has been referred to as the Leuchter report since it was published by Zündel with that title.

In 1988 Leuchter was hired by Ernst Zündel, who was being tried in Canada for publishing works of Holocaust denial, to investigate and testify as an expert witness at his trial, for a fee of $30,000. Leuchter was recommended to Zündel by Bill Armontrout, warden for Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri. In his capacity as warden, Armontrout was personally responsible for carrying out executions by the use of cyanide gas. Leuchter traveled to Auschwitz and Birkenau to examine the structures identified by former guards, former prisoners, and investigators as gas chambers, and concluded that they could not have been used for mass murder.

In 1988, prior to writing the report, Leuchter had traveled to several sites of structures identified as gas chambers, where, without permission, he collected samples from walls, ceilings and floors, using a chisel and hammer to chip and scrape off pieces of the masonry. He took copious notes about the floor plans and layout, and all of his actions were videotaped by a cameraman. (Leuchter, who had married only about one month before the trip, told his wife that the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau was their honeymoon.) Leuchter then brought the samples back to Boston, where he presented them to Alpha Analytical Laboratories, a chemical laboratory, for testing. Leuchter told Alpha only that he would use the samples as evidence in a court case about an industrial accident. The lab tested them for exposure to cyanide and found trace amounts in the crematoria, which Leuchter dismissed in his report:

Leuchter started Fred Leuchter Associates in 1979, with which he sold services to several states to help them maintain, improve, document, and ascertain the effectiveness of their equipment for administration of capital punishment. His initial work was with electric chairs, starting in Tennessee. His broader claims are that his work in this area is humanitarian, providing greater respect for both guards and those to be executed. He also claims that he offered his services at considerable economy: off-the-shelf parts, labor, and a 20% profit. By his own account, consultation among various state government agencies spread his reputation from Tennessee to other states, and further assignments followed. Leuchter "aggressively solicited business", and in 1985 the state of New Jersey purchased his proposal for a lethal injection system for $30,000.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Boston University in 1964. He holds patents for a geodetic instrument and an electronic sextant.

Fred Arthur Leuchter Jr. (born February 7, 1943) is an American manufacturer of execution equipment, and a Holocaust denier best known as the author of the Leuchter report, a pseudoscientific document alleging there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Prior to the document's publication, he was contracted by authorities of several U.S. states to improve the designs of instruments for capital punishment. He was charged in Massachusetts with misrepresenting himself to penitentiaries as an engineer, despite having no relevant qualifications. He plea bargained with state prosecutors and received two years' probation. He has also been accused of running a "death row shakedown", where he threatened to testify for the defense in capital cases if he was not given contracts for his services by that state.

Leuchter was born on February 7, 1943, to Fred Arthur Leuchter Sr. in Malden, Massachusetts.