THE RUDOLF REPORT - Holocaust Handbooks

GERMAR RUDOLF · THE RUDOLF REPORT 25
certain components of masonry.
This substance can still be
observed in surviving delousing
facilities today. It is obviously
a very stable compound.
Professor Faurisson
was the first person to point
out that this blue discoloration
is absent from the supposed
homicidal gas chambers at
Auschwitz. Faurisson’s idea
was to analyze samples from
the masonry in the alleged
homicidal gas chambers for
traces of poison gas or its compounds
(cyanides) and compare
them with samples taken
from the delousing chambers.
Fred Leuchter followed this
Fig. 7: Frederick A. Leuchter, the
world’s first, and possibly only, cyanide
gas chamber expert, during a talk at the
conference of the Institute for Historical
Review in 1992
suggestion when doing his on-site investigations in Auschwitz in 1988.
On April 20 and 21, 1988, Leuchter took the stand as an expert witness
in the courtroom in Toronto. He reported about his research and
developed his conclusions. The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense.
Leuchter’s testimony was straightforward and at the same time sensational:
According to Leuchter, there had never been any possibility of
mass extermination of human beings by gassing either in Auschwitz, or
in Birkenau, or in Majdanek: 30
“It is the best engineering opinion of this author that the alleged gas
chambers at the inspected sites could not have then been, or now, be utilized
or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.”
Shortly before Leuchter, another witness was questioned: Bill Armontrout,
warden of the Maximum Security Prison in Jefferson City,
Missouri. It was Armontrout who, on request of defense attorney Barbara
Kulaszka, pointed out that no one in the United States understood the
operation of gas chambers better than Fred A. Leuchter. Armontrout
himself confirmed in court the great difficulties involved in killing
people with poison gas, as Robert Faurisson had done before him.
30 F. A. Leuchter, An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz,
Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat Publishers Ltd., Toronto 1988; new: F.A. Leuchter,
“The First Leuchter Report,” in: F.A. Leuchter et al., op. cit. (note 9), pp. 13-119, here p. 57.