Two groups that have been monitoring the activities of Holocaust revisionist Fred Leuchter have expressed satisfaction with an official statement he has made admitting he is not an engineer qualified to comment authoritatively on execution equipment.
The Anti-Defamation League and Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, which filed a complaint of fraudulent misrepresentation against Leuchter, hailed the signed consent decree that Leuchter submitted Tuesday to the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors.
ADL hailed the statement as “a major blow against the Holocaust revisionist movement.”
The statement was made as part of a deal with the state by Leuchter, who is the author of a notorious report denying that the Nazi gas chambers were designed to kill people.
Leuchter, who wrote the report on the basis of his professed expertise in the field of execution equipment, was to have gone on trial June 24 in Malden, Mass., for practicing without a license.
In his statement, Leuchter wrote: “I am not and never have been registered as a professional engineer with the board.”
The agreement also specifies that Leuchter will be on “pre-trial probation for two years,” according to Shelly Shapiro, director of Holocaust Survivors and Friends, a group based in Albany, N.Y., whose April 1990 complaint against Leuchter initiated the legal proceedings against him.
In Tuesday’s agreement, Leuchter also stated that he had misrepresented himself before the states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Alabama and others, as “an engineer able to consult in areas of engineering concerning execution technology.”
Moreover, he admitted to having “produced reports, specifically but not limited to ‘An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek’ containing my engineering opinions, which I have submitted to other individuals and which were subsequently published.”
Leonard Zakim, ADL’s New England regional director, said “Leuchter’s admission of lying to promote his business, in violation of Massachusetts law, should serve to discredit Leuchter everywhere he travels.”
“In effect, he threw in the towel,” said Ir-win Suall, head of ADL’s fact-finding department.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
