Discrediting the Leuchter ReportSource of this Document:
This document was originally posted in the early 2000s on a now long-dead EZBoard by Stuart Slade.
From analysing the document, and knowing Stuart's prior work history (he worked at the Hudson Institute as an analyst when Herman Kahn was still alive) and personal experience (born in the UK, emigrated to the US), I believe that Stuart was one of the authors; per this line in the document:
One of the authors can remember a scandal when he was a child following the discovery that a local metal plating works used precisely this technique, discharging the waste to a nearby (publicly accessible) lake.
Another giveaway is that while formatting this from the raw archive file into this version; I noticed the following passages in the original text:
equating to a flow rate of O.5ft/sec
and
a gas concentration of l00ppm was used
These are common OCR errors – i.e. lower case L (l) and one (1) get mixed up, along with Capital O (O) and zero (0).
I believe this may have originally been written in the late 1990s either to be passed around as copies “at work”; or it was written and posted onto a now long-exinct internet board (the original NavWeaps forums, possibly).
The OCR errors indicate that Stuart may have printed a hard copy out; and then at some later time period, had someone do an OCR of the hard copy to make it “digital” again.
The printout path seems like the most likely possibility, since the durability of floppy disks was not always the best, and word processing software had changed dramatically over the last ten years (1988-1998); so having a physical printout was a “safer bet” than a 3.5” floppy with your work saved on it in a now-obsolete format.
RECOVERY OF THE DOCUMENT
This was recovered through a friend of mine who had saved it to their archives – the original electronic text having been lost over the years as successive web boards inhabited by Stuart “went dead” due to the march of time.
The following represents comments on The Leuchter Report - The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz. It is split into two parts, the first covering the historical side of the investigation; the second a technical critique of the report, its methodology and its assumptions.
The Leuchter report was submitted to a professional writer of WW2 histories who has long experience in the handling and analysis of historical documents and investigations. A technical analysis was also made by an engineer with many years experience in the industry.
HISTORICAL SUMMARY
The Leuchter report is extremely poorly documented. Although many references are made to plans and diagrams these are not included nor any indication as to their provenance made. There is no diagrammatic or photographic record of the samples taken or their environment, Although a brief “bibliography” is provided, it is cosmetic only and largely self-serving. All comments are made in a historical vacuum which casts great doubt on their reliability. Appendices do contain company-produced material on the chemical products Hydrogen Cyanide, Sodium Cyanide and Zyklon B, their properties and handling, precautions. These do not relate in any significant sense to the report, being either 40 years late and/or for use in an entirely different environment. This alone is a crushing blow to the credibility of the Leuchter Report.
The substance of the report, its style, methodology and approach, are clearly those of 1980's America. Its opinions and engineering practices clearly reflect the highly safety-conscious approach of the US industrial environment and the influence of the US Occupational Health and Safety At Work Act.
It shows no appreciation of the spirit and character of the times.
TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
The key to the Leuchter Report lies in its assumption that a gas concentration of 3200 parts per million (ppm) of HCN was required within the chamber. This basic initial assumption of 3200 ppm stems from Leuchter's alleged background and experience, as a designer of judicial execution chambers intended for use safely and in a (relatively) humane manner. These design priorities were to ensure the quickest and most humane possible death for the victim and the absolute maximum in safety for the staff of the facility. The first consideration requires an exceptionally high lethal volume (3200 ppm can best be described as “one-gulp and you're dead”) With this extraordinary lethality, the second factor, precautions against the leakage of gas must be extreme.
Consulting the company safety literature it is obvious that 3200 ppm is exceptionally dangerous being more than ten times the concentration (300 ppm) considered to bring about “rapid and immediate death”. An interesting fact is that the much lower concentration of 100 ppm will bring about death over a period of 30 to 45 minutes assuming that no attempt is made to administer treatment to the victims – we believe [this to be] a fair assumption!
Documentation (which is quoted without comment as its authenticity) repeatedly indicates that the screaming from inside the gas chambers continued for up to 45 minutes before all indications of activity ceased. This is far from “rapid and immediate death”. The inescapable conclusion from that documentation is that, if the gas chambers existed, they must have operated on a concentration far below 3200 ppm, well below 300 ppm, probably in the region of 100 ppm.
A supplementary factor is that in US judicial execution chambers, the victim is strapped, fully dressed, into a chair; gas ingestion is thus by inhalation. According to literature the victims of the gas chambers were herded naked into the facility having been made to run from the undressing rooms to the chambers The victims were thus gasping for breath while immersed in a toxic atmosphere. Since HCN can access the body by skin absorption as well as by inhalation, this greatly increases the effectiveness of low concentrations of the gas and makes the use of 100 ppm fully credible. The result makes a dramatic difference to the whole report.
In view of the correlation between the lethal exposure period for 100 ppm HCN and the claimed time for the occupants of the gas chambers to expire it will be assumed that the facilities operated on a gas concentration in the region of 100 ppm.
Toxicity considerations based on the Leuchter Report documentation thus supports rather than contradicts the Holocaust literature.
A key point in the Leuchter analysis of the facility design is the presence in the chambers of a direct outlet to the sewer system.
This, it is claimed, would permit the gas to access every part of the camp connected to the sewers leading to massive and indiscriminate death.
This criticism is only valid for the 3200 ppm regime. Leuchter's use of the 3200 ppm level makes him miss the point of that sewer access completely. Leuchter gives no indication as to whether there is flowing water down there. This is a factor of such key importance that its omission is a crushing blow against the validity of the entire report.
If it is a wet sewer (and the rudimentary evidence available would suggest this is the case), the presence of constantly flowing water under a small aperture entrains air and causes suction from the area above the aperture down into the sewer. This technique, known as the Bernoulli Effect is frequently used in laboratories to create vacuums for filtration and to prevent the spread of noxious vapours. The effect is to create a negative pressure gradient by which air is drawn from outside into the body of the chamber then down into the sewer. Gas cannot escape against this gradient!
The airflow into the chamber prevents gas escaping from the chamber, eliminates the need for seals on doors and windows and vastly reduces the exposure to toxic gas of anybody outside the chamber. It should be pointed out that the reverse of this procedure, a marginal overpressure inside tanks and armored fighting vehicles provides absolute protection for the occupants against chemical and biological weapons outside the vehicle.
The effect of the sewer would also be to circulate air, ensuring the gas is well spread and also to continually draw fresh air in from outside, maintaining the gas concentration by evaporation from the Zyklon-B pellets. HCN is heavier than air and thus cannot rise. Combined with the downward airflow this would ensure the safety of anybody standing on the roof.
The final importance of the sewers is that the HCN gas is highly soluble in water. Thus, the water within the sewer would absorb the gas drawn off giving an exceptionally dilute and relatively harmless solution. This method of waste disposal (used for example in metal plating plants) is utterly illegal today but was commonplace in the past.
One of the authors can remember a scandal when he was a child following the discovery that a local metal plating works used precisely this technique, discharging the waste to a nearby (publicly accessible) lake.
On the basis of a 100 ppm gas concentration, that sewer outlet becomes a major working feature of the design, rather than a fundamental weakness. Its presence removes the need for gaskets on doors and windows, the need for exhaust systems to remove the gas and the need to artificially circulate the air. It also eliminates the need for burners to remove spent gas. The lack of these features is considered by Leuchter to prove that the buildings in question could not have been used as a gas chamber. This contention is destroyed by the presence of the wet sewer and the use of 100 ppm gas.
The 100 ppm concentration is well below the lower explosive limit for HCN. Contrary to the assertions in the Leuchter Report, gas leaking into the crematoriums would not result in an explosion even if the sewer suction system failed but would simply be burned off. Again, Leuchter's use of a 3200 ppm concentration has led to fundamental error. There is a most peculiar contradiction in the report in that he states that the gas vapours would have to be burned off yet also that the same vapour concentration would cause a massive explosion if it was burned by accident in the crematoria.
Leuchter claims that at least a week would be needed to ventilate the chambers prior to removing the bodies and cleansing. This is based on US industrial safety standards, a complete lack of ventilation and the 3200 ppm concentration. The use of 100 ppm dramatically reduces the time needed to reduce concentration.
It is reasonably obvious that the German SS guards would not have applied 1989 US industrial safety standards to the slave labour used to clear the chambers. The volume of one chamber is quoted as 7,657 ft3. A swept volume of 120 ft3/min would be needed to completely change this in one hour equating to a flow rate of 0.5 ft/sec. An air current of this speed is hardly distinguishable from still air. Assuming 1 hour is left for ventilation the result would be a residual gas concentration of 15-25ppm within the chamber. The symptoms in crews used to clear/clean the chamber would, after prolonged exposure, be headaches, nausea, reddening of the eyes, giddiness and weakness.
Interestingly these are exactly the symptoms experienced by survivors of the work teams used for this purpose and previously assumed to be a psychosomatic result of the horror of the experience. We therefore propose that the alleged stress-related symptoms are indeed the results of low level HCN poisoning. This is a further case of Leuchter's own work actually verifying Holocaust accounts when placed in a proper context.
Given half an hour to load the chamber, an hour for gassing, an hour for ventilation and half an hour for unloading we have a raw cycle time of 3 hours. This means that two gassings per day (morning and afternoon) is entirely possible and discredits Leuchter's one-per-week hypothesis. Leuchter estimates the total maximum death toll on the basis of his one gassing per week as 105,688. Correcting this to two gassings per day gives a death toll of 1,479,632.
A minor point is that Leuchter's capacity estimate is based on 9 ft2 per person. This is generous and literature indicates that the victims were tight-packed. Reducing the space occupancy to 6.25 ft2 (in other words a floor block 2ft 6in on each side rather than 3 ft) would increase the death-toll maximum to approximately 2.2 million.
The overwhelming probability of a 100 ppm operating concentration also discredits his sample technique. Obviously if the gas concentration was 100 ppm, the residue concentration in the walls cannot be greater. The samples were exposed to a damp, cold environment for 40 years. Leaching and chemical breakdown would be such that even the stablest complexes would be degraded. To find 6 ppm under such circumstances is remarkable.
The “control sample” was from a delouser used several times per day at 3200 ppm and [from] a small, self-contained unit completely enclosed and sheltered. To suggest that this is an adequate control sample for others taken in exposed brickwork control is exceptionally bad scientific technique and discredits the entire sample programme. A detailed gas kinetic study using a 100ppm baseline strongly suggests that a sampling programme would expect no detectable concentration in an exposed sample.
Leuchter also points at the presence outside the chambers of a sunken walkway. He claims that gas would collect here and render it a death trap. This is another strange and inexplicable contradiction in his thesis. In earlier sections he states gas would flow onto the roof yet here he proves he realises the implications of HCN being heavier air by pointing out that it would collect in the sunken path. This was probably the purpose of this path, an additional precaution against the spread of stray vapour. If water was present it would absorb the vapour as a dilute solution which would then drain away.
Interestingly one of the photographs illustrating the Leuchter Report shows rainwater collecting in this ditch, providing just the type of barrier proposed!
In the sections relating to the use of carbon monoxide as an execution medium, Leuchter has stepped outside his alleged area expertise and it shows badly.
For a start, the gas execution vans were powered by petrol, not diesel. This is highly significant since it shows his basic ignorance of the circumstances and also that petrol engines are highly efficient generators of carbon monoxide. It must also be pointed out that petrol engine exhaust poisoning is the third most common form of suicide in the UK and a surprisingly frequent means of murder. Carbon monoxide poisoning is a frequent form of accidental death, being either the result of running a car engine in an enclosed space or by sharing such a space with a coke-burning stove operating in an inefficient manner. In these cases the victims have been rendered unconscious and then dead within a few minutes. To quote 4000 ppm at 2.5 atmospheres, although perhaps consistent with a US judicial execution, is, in this context, ludicrous and again reflects his constant bias to analysing everything in current US terms.
Finally the Leuchter report looks at crematorium use.
The technical details of this section were evaluated by a visit to a local crematorium and by consulting with the staff of same. This quick and convenient sanity check on Leuchter's work reveals that, once again, his statements and calculations are so far removed from reality that his alleged expertise in such matters is seriously compromised. Again he uses US practice as standard. As an example, in discussing the movement of corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria, he assumes that every corpse being moved would be placed on a Gurney and would have an individual attendant. Any rational assessment of this procedure would assume that the corpses are stuffed into a lift, then hauled out at the other end and piled into the ovens. Incidently all his figures are worked out on single corpse occupancy of the oven, yet literature clearly states occupancy was on a basis of two large or three small bodies/oven. Assuming that the ovens were worked as hard as they would go, this points the capacity figure being at least in the region of a total of 750,000 corpses and probably much higher.
CONCLUSIONS
The Leuchter Report is bad science being fundamentally flawed as to its treatment of literature and worked out on a basis on irrelevant prior assumptions. One amusing example relates to gas concentration – Leuchter proudly relates that the air in a US HCN execution chamber is exchanged seventy times prior to entry. A quick kinetic calculation shows this would leave a residual gas concentration of 62 ppm. Yet if, as this discussion strongly indicates, a gas concentration of 100 ppm was used as the execution medium at Auschwitz, a single exchange would reduce the concentration to 25 ppm at most. Thus it could be argued that the SS showed greater safety consciousness than the US judicial system.
This is, of course, quite ridiculous, but does reveal the care that needs to be taken when considering concentrations of highly lethal gas and the necessary safety precautions.
The following conclusions can be made.
1)The design of the alleged gas chambers is consistent with the use of HCN at a concentration of 100 ppm.
2) That the literature evidence on the Holocaust is consistent with the likely outcome of mass gassing attempts at 100 ppm.
3) That the capacity of the Birkenau facilities is consistent with the alleged execution totals as internationally accepted.
4) The sampling of the walls and the subsequent analysis for cyanide residues is scientifically invalid due to inadequate controls and the effects of the long period of time between use and study.
5) The facilities are not “highly efficient and well designed” as frequently stated but a hastily-conceived compromise between existing design art and the requirements. This is consistent with much of the available records on construction and concept.
6) There is no problem in relating crematorium capacity to death toll.
7) The Leuchter Report on its own does not conclusively prove that the buildings in question were used as gas chambers. Equally its conclusions that they could not have been do not stand up to rigorous analysis. Contrary to the author's assertions forensic science is not exact except in detective fiction. At best, it is a matter of balancing probabilities. In all such cases it must be considered in the light of other available evidence. In this context, the omission of all other evidence from the Leuchter Report and its exclusion of any other criteria of analysis is damning.
In spite of his highly doubtful expertise, Leuchter is not a forensic scientist nor is he a historian. Had he been either, his first reaction should have been that his investigation contradicted the mass of evidence. Where this occurs, there are the following possibilities:
a) the mass of evidence is wrong.
b) his conclusions are wrong.
c) the contradiction is due to a significant factor being wrong or omitted.
Leuchter, having correctly analysed the problem in the light of his own experience then simply assumed that his conclusions invalidated all the other evidence available and reported accordingly. A forensic scientist or skilled historian would then have asked what factor would have eliminated the contradiction.
The reports of a 30-45 minute death time would have pointed him at 100 ppm gas concentration and led to a fundamental reassessment of his report.
Once that 100ppm assumption is made, all the Holocaust evidence falls into place. When read with this basic situation in mind, such accurate and detailed evidence that is provided by the Leuchter Report confirms them, which leads to our final conclusion.
8) The evidence of the Leuchter Report when taken in the context of the times and in full consideration of all other evidence strongly supports, rather than contradicts, both the fact and scale of the massacres in the gas chambers of Birkenau. It also confirms the practicality of the design of the buildings identified as gas chambers for this purpose provided the assumption is made that said gas chambers operated at relatively low toxic concentrations.