A bit about Fred Leuchter

One of the more important names in the movie is of a character who doesn't appear, a Holocaust denier and crank named Fred Leuchter. The name comes up during the Auschwitz visit, and the marks of some of the places where the real-life Leuchter vandalized the site are visible in the movie. Then the name comes up again in the courtroom, where Rampton QC explains that it was Irving's exposure to Leuchter's crank report that first brought him into the sphere of Holocaust denial.

Leuchter was a self-proclaimed engineer and self-proclaimed expert in gas chambers. In the 1980s Ernst Zündel paid him $35,000 to write a scientific-looking report "proving" that there were no homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. The report was a joke, for lots of reasons.

But you don't have to take my word for it. It turns out that Leuchter was, in 1999, the subject of a great documentary by no less a figure than Errol Morris.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192335/

Among the figures Morris interviewed and who show up in the movie are not only the real-life David Irving and the real-life Robert Jan van Pelt, but also Zündel, another figure mentioned often in "Denial."

But there's also the appearance of the chemist who did the actual chemical analysis on the Leuchter samples, who carefully explains why the Leuchter analysis is meaningless: because he was not told what he was testing -- surface deposits caused by exposure to cyanide gas -- he didn't do a surface-only test, but tested the whole volume of the sample, thereby diluting the surface deposits to the point of undetectability.

The movie "Denial" notes that the Leuchter report is crap, but doesn't go into detail why. But van Pelt's expert report for the court took it apart in great detail, and that is now part of the public record.

https://www.hdot.org/vanpelt/#vanPelt_4-9