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

Dec 29, 1999

1h 31m

★ 6.9

Overview

A portrait of the life and career of the infamous American execution device designer Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Mr. Leuchter was an engineer who became an expert on execution devices and was later hired by holocaust revisionist historian Ernst Zundel to "prove" that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Leuchter published a controversial report confirming Zundel's position, which ultimately ruined his own career. Most of the footage is of Leuchter, working in and around execution facilities or chipping away at the walls of Auschwitz, but Morris also interviews various historians, associates, and neighbors.

Genres

Documentary

Production Companies

Independent Film Channel

Fourth Floor Pictures

Scout Productions

Channel 4 Television

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Trailers

Cast

Self

Fred A. Leuchter Jr.

Self

Robert Jan van Pelt

Self

David Irving

Self (voice)

Caroline Leuchter

Self

James Roth

Self

Shelly Shapiro

Self

Suzanne Tabasky

Self

Ernst Zündel

Re-enactment cast

David Collins

Re-enactment cast

Daniel Polsby

Re-enactment cast

Jeff Brown

Re-enactment cast

Robert Duerr

13 years ago, director Bob Entrop made the film A piece of blue in the sky, the first film in the Netherlands that depicted the murder of almost 1 million Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. There is a taboo on what happened during the war, you don't talk about it with anyone and certainly not in front of a camera. Requiem for Auschwitz is a sequel, with the most valuable moments from the first film, supplemented with the grandchildren and the creation and performance of the 'Requiem for Auschwitz' by Sinti composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb by the Sinti and Roma Philharmonic from Frankfurt and a Jewish choir in the Berliner Dom in Berlin, during Holocaust Memorial Day. During his visit to Auschwitz in 2020 with four musicians from the Dutch Accompaniment Orchestra, Roger shows them the places that inspired him.

No Image Available

0.0

Holocaust Denial vs. Freedom of Speech

Jan 1, 1994

No overview available.

No Image Available

0.0

...aus erzieherischen Gründen - Die Geschichte eines Justizmordes

Jan 1, 1990

TV documentary about Manfred Smolka, an officer of the GDR border troops who was executed in Leipzig on July 12, 1960. He had been ambushed after his escape to West Germany and a show trial was held after his arrest.

10.0

Att stå utanför och se in…

Apr 24, 2010

No overview available.

No Image Available

0.0

This Temporal World

Feb 11, 2022

A haunting story of the FBI's dark hand in American life. In 2015, Khalil Abu-Rayyan was just a young Muslim man in Detroit, Michigan: to get by, he delivered food for his family's pizzeria. Depressed and lonely, Khalil found solace in smoking weed and looking at extremist material online. Then two young women started messaging him, and he fell in love. But one of them suggested he start doing increasingly violent things. Nothing was as it seemed. And Khalil's life would never be the same. A documentary by Garret Harkawik for the Gravel Institute.

0.0

Latvian Coyote

Dec 1, 2019

An absurd game of “finding happiness” is being played by local Latvian coyotes* and illegal immigrants on the Russian and the European Union border. It is a game with no winner – all participants are driven to play by the sense of despair. While one side leaves home and undertakes a perilous journey to the other side of the globe, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in a free country, the other side risks their freedom to earn a chance to stay right where they are, in their homeland. *coyote – someone who smuggles illegal immigrants

6.3

Survivor's Guide to Prison

Feb 23, 2018

Today, you're more likely to go to prison in the United States than anywhere else in the world. So in the unfortunate case it should happen to you - this is the Survivors Guide to Prison.

0.0

The Girl from Auschwitz

Aug 25, 2005

A portrait of the legendary Swedish journalist and writer Cordelia Edvardson (1929-2012). She was only fourteen when she alone was brought to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt and later to the camp of Auschwitz.

7.3

The Iceman and the Psychiatrist

Jun 1, 2004

For the third time, HBO cameras go inside Trenton State Maximum Security Prison--and inside the mind of one of the most prolific killers in U.S. history--in this gripping documentary. Mafia hit man Richard Kuklinski freely admits to killing more than 100 people, but in this special, he speaks with top psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz in an effort to face the truth about his condition. Filled with more never-before-revealed confessions, it's the most chillingly candid Iceman special yet as it combines often-confrontational interview footage between Kuklinski and Dietz with photos, crime reenactments and home movies that add new layers to this evolving and fascinating story.

6.9

Architects of Denial

Oct 6, 2017

Though both the historical and modern-day persecution of Armenians and other Christians is relatively uncovered in the mainstream media and not on the radar of many average Americans, it is a subject that has gotten far more attention in recent years.

0.0

Dead Behind Bars

Apr 24, 2014

200 young people under 25 have died in custody since 1992 in England and Wales. This is the story of three of them; young men who died behind bars - told by the people who knew them best, it explores the flaws in the system and the lapses in care that contributed to their deaths.

0.0

Behind the Burning Cross: Racism USA

Jan 1, 1991

A key overview of twentieth-century American fascism and antifascism produced in 1991 by the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.

6.6

White Terror

Aug 5, 2005

A video about Neo-Nazis originating in Sweden provides the starting point of an investigation of extremists' networks in Europe, Russia, and North America. Their propaganda is a message of hatred, war, and segregation.

8.2

Night and Fog

Apr 27, 1959

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

0.0

Ashley Smith : Out of Control

Jan 8, 2010

Ashley Smith was a troubled 19-year-old when she choked herself to death at Ontario's Grand Valley Institution for Women. Her death made national headlines and led to a scathing report by Canada’s federal prison ombudsman. Incarceration for Ashley began at a youth detention centre in New Brunswick. Her crime: she had tossed crabapples at a mailman. Her one-month sentence stretched to almost four years, served in five provinces. With the prison videotapes and exclusive access to Smith’s parents, along with a fellow inmate, this documentary exposes a system that fails the many Ashley Smiths still incarcerated in Canadian institutions.

6.6

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

Apr 7, 2005

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

6.7

The Big One

Sep 6, 1997

The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.