If it seems I am repeating myself, it is because I am daily adding new readers who are novices to this struggle and need to get the sign posts of what our information outreach is really all about.
So here we go again:
The Errol Morris Leuchter film is slated to open in Los Angeles in less than three weeks. When I first saw it in Toronto in September, I just kept counting all the props in our favor: the full-screen cover of the fabled "Did Six Million Really Die?" booklet; the surreal Third Reich Leni Riefenstahl segment; Ernst, on the shoulders of his friends at the beginning of his trial in 1988, unrolling the banner that said: "The Holocau$t is hate propaganda!" - and, best of all, Ernst telling the world very firmly: "We Germans will not go down in history as genocidal maniacs! We! Will! Not!!!" Oh, it was heaven!
Even before my Toronto friends and I saw the documentary, we all took it for granted that, for the film to pass muster and even be allowed to be released, it would have to have the conventional Politically Correct Tribal Spin - and so it does. What else did we expect?
Quite a few people find that upsetting. I can see why they would. But I still say: So what?
The Errol Morris documentary implies that Ernst lost in his trials - without telling the audience he won at the Supreme Court level - after a protracted nine-year fight -
Morris parades the traditional, verbally abusive Holocaustomaniac - in this case, Shelly Shapiro spewing her "Nazi!" and "Anti-Semite!" epithets -
Morris hauls forth the smarmy Jan van Pelt who unrolls some ancient scrolls, implying unctuously they are authentic architectural Auschwitz building plans. Van Pelt gives ominous meaning to perfectly harmless, everyday German phrases and words in the time-honored Talmudic gyration and sophistry mode. He mutters about "sacred grounds" being investigatively defiled by Truth Detective Leuchter. Van Pelt, the "scientist", deals largely in theology - while Leuchter states his findings -
Morris even managed to unearth a spacey-looking, thin-lipped Professor Roth of Cornell University who does an absolutely embarrassing recanting act on camera that the scientific world community will yet make him live to regret - and which might have serious legal consequences, for it would mean that Roth perjured himself under oath in a court in Toronto. Science did not change its rules and laws in the last decade!
But all in all, I say the film is in our favor because it makes two points:
1) There was a dramatic scientific expedition to Auschwitz to sample rocks and mortar to be examined for Zyklon B to determine the amount, if any, and
2) the person who led this expedition, Fred Leuchter, paid dearly for his verifiable scientific findings. The Big-H Lobby made him pay.
If Errol Morris had truly wanted to be fair, he would have said that Leuchter's preliminary findings have now been corroborated by three other scientific reports: The Lüftl Report, the Rudolf Report, and the Cracow Report. Findings? Lots of Zyklon B in the delousing chambers! Negligible or no Zyklon B in so-called "gassing chambers"!
***That*** is the heart of the Leuchter Report. Morris didn't say that. He should have - but he didn't.
On second thought, perhaps he did. Perhaps that segment landed on the cutting room floor because somebody leaned on Errol Morris. Hard.
We now know that the original Leuchter documentary was "modified" two times - first after the Harvard University screening, and the second time after the Robert Redford Sundance Festival - to make it marketable in today's America by making or keeping it politically correct and to prop up the myth of the ". . . six million gassed" just a little while longer. How long will it last? Your guess is as good as my guess.
Against that backdrop, it is instructive to watch tribal instincts kick in and win out with this Errol Morris fellow - who promised Ernst he would do justice to this story and fairly present the Revisionist side. This morning's Hoffman Wire brought us this latest segment, titled "The Accidental Nazi":
The Fall 1999 issue of"Bomb" magazine (no pun intended), pp. 26-32, (tel. 212-431-3943. E-mail: bomb@echonyc.com) -- contains an interview with Jewish director Earl (sic) Morris, whose film, "Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr." is slated for national distribution early next year.
Morris admits he had made an earlier version of the documentary about gas chamber revisionist Leuchter, but stopped distributing it.
Interviewer Margot Livesey: "You've said the version of 'Mr. Death' you showed at Harvard gave people no place to be outside Fred's head..."
Morris: "I was very, very surprised at the response to that screening. To me it was quite clear that the movie was filled with irony...But judging from people's reactions after watching the film, it became clear I was wrong. People bought into Fred's story, hook, line and sinker. They began to wonder, why didn't he find cyanide in the brickwork at Auschwitz? And was there poison gas used at Birkenau? That response was unacceptable to me."
Morris then re-edited the film to make it tougher on revisionism: "I wanted to make it clear in the movie that there is no doubt that Fred is wrong. That's why I included other voices. People were killed with poison gas at Auschwitz. Hundreds and thousands of people were murdered in cold blood with gas at Auschwitz...The movie tries to sketch out the central reasons...
"...in Mr. Death, Leuchter indeed makes a number of erroneous factual claims, factual claims that people care passionately about...what precipitated his fall was the fact that he made false claims. That's what brought about his undoing...
"...there were three different kinds of Nazis in the movie, there was Zundel the avuncular, New-Age Nazi. Zundel was funny, he was charming, he was engaging; clearly anti-Semitic, obsessed with Jews. David Irving is the pseudoaristocratic, pedantic Nazi who I found the least sympathetic of the three. And Fred, the accidental Nazi...Fred struck me as the clueless narrator; the guy who is lost in some strange mythology of his own devising, this world that he's created for himself... Mr. Death is...a story of someone living in a private world which is completely disconnected from the real world..."
Interviewer: "There's a scene in the film when Fred gives a paper at the neo-Nazi conference and at the end he says, 'I hope I haven't disappointed you,' and just smiles at the audience, at the camera. It's heart-wrenching. You think, Oh, Fred, you shouldn't be in this company."
Morris: "Well, you know, I have this tag line: What if we need to be loved more than anything else in the world, and the only people who will love you are Nazis? What do you do?"
(THE HOFFMAN WIRE, Dec. 8, 1999, Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor <http://www.hoffman-info.com> Subscribe/Unsubscribe: hoffman@hoffman-info.com )
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Now isn't life delicious? So now you know how Jewish film are doctored - and why the party line wins out.
Ingrid
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Thought for the Day:
"I found it offensive to show a Christian steeple each time the scene about the "In Focus" program went to New York and a German company - supposedly to discuss the resistance to reparations.
"I trust that, one day, when the atrocities and murders done by Communists come to light, you will equally show a synagogue in the background with equal fervor when survivors and their descendants start seeking reparations from those responsible."
(Letter to the Editor of "In Focus", copied to the Zundelsite)
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Bulletin added later in the day:
This is a follow-up on this morning's ZGram:
I just received a fax announcing that the Leuchter film is playing ***tonight*** in Los Angeles. Here is the entire text as it appeared in one of the Jewish publications:
This week at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the spotlight is on documentary film director, Errol Morris. Morris's most recent film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Alfred A. Leuchter Jr., followed by an on-stage conversation with Morris, shows as the first program in this week-long tribute. In this stark feature on Alfred A. Leuchter Jr., Morris traces the life of one of the head figures in the Holocaust denial movement. 7:30 p.M. $7.00 (adults); $5.00 (seniors and students); $1.00 (children). 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. For more information on other Morris films to be screened, please call (323) 857-6000 or visit LACMA on the web at www.lacma.org
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