Fred Leuchter Jr., who designs capital punishment systems for a living and pursues Holocaust denial as a vocation, won a continuance until Jan. 22 of his trial in Malden District Court for practicing engineering without a license.
Leuchter requested that his court-appointed attorney be changed to Kirk Lyons, a Houston lawyer who has defended white supremacists.
Lyons, a founder of the so-called Patriot Defenders Foundation, told a news conference in Malden, a Boston suburb, that he is trying to raise money for Leuchter’s defense.
Leuchter, if convicted, faces a possible three-month jail sentence and a $500 fine.
A guilty verdict could temper the effects of Leuchter’s real offense, which is the use of his self-proclaimed scientific and technological expertise to give credibility to Holocaust revisionism.
That accounted for the presence outside the Malden courthouse on Dec. 11 of more than 250 Holocaust survivors who shouted, “Six million died, Leuchter lied” as the defendant was escorted to his hearing.
“The Leuchter Report,” published in 1988 and 1990, alleges that gas chambers were not used to kill Jews at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen and the Hartheim Castle concentration camps.
Leuchter says he reached that conclusion by analyzing samples of brick and mortar from buildings at the camps.
“The Leuchter Report” became the most widely used document of the revisionists trying to discredit the Holocaust, led by the California-based Institute for Historical Review.
VETERANS AND SURVIVORS SPEAK OUT
After the hearing, Leuchter said at a news conference that the Nazis had no gas chambers.
“I believe that there were no alleged homicidal gas chambers at the three camps I was in,” said the Malden native, who has threatened to sue two women instrumental in bringing him to trial.
They are Shelly Shapiro of Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, and Paris-based Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld.
Forty yards away stood Fred Gelin, one of the half-dozen Malden Jewish war veterans who talked about liberating the camps.
“I saw bodies piled one on top of another. I couldn’t go into the death camp without wearing a gas mask. That’s how bad the smell of dead bodies would be,” he said.
Shapiro held up a book, “Truth Prevails, Demolishing Holocaust Denial” which, she said, refutes Leuchter point by point. “We have shown that truth does prevail. He is no scientist, he is no engineer. He is a fake.”
Klarsfeld, who helped capture Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, said, “He has to know, not only Leuchter, but the others: If they continue this dirty work in denying the deaths of millions of Jews, we will be there.”
“We are eyewitnesses to the crimes committed by the Nazis,” said Israel Arbeiter of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. “What Leuchter did at Auschwitz was a fraud, taking pieces of cement and stone. We were there. We saw the atrocities with our own eyes.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
