Liverpool opinions
Flake - An open letter to Fred 'Fruit-cake' Leuchter
By John Williams
For those among you who don't know who Fred Leuchter is, I will give a brief outline of his resistible rise to ignominy. Fred was a quiet lad, whose only interest was refining and improving the various machines used for judicial execution.
In his early life his avowed mission was to build bigger and better electric chairs, lethal injection machines, gas chambers and gallows with the laudable aim of improving the death agonies of the executed criminals and improve efficiency.
Efficiency. How certain people love that word. His success in his chosen field can be gauged by the fact that several States in America employed him to do just that.
Recently, in an attempt to re-invent himself as a human being, he even suggested that those prisoners awaiting death by lethal injection should be strapped to chairs and be allowed to watch television, listen to music or view pictures on the wall of the death chamber.
This, as much as anything else, reveals what a flake Fred really is. I mean, can you imagine being in the mood to watch an episode of 'Friends' surrounded by your executioners!
Fred slithered into the spotlight in the eighties when he went to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. After poking around in the remains of the dynamited crematoria, which for fifty years had lain exposed to the ravages of arctic winters and the depredations of local Poles carting off the bricks to build their houses, Fred the head declared that no Jews had ever been gassed or murdered there!
Despite the fact that his so called scientific evidence has since been proved utterly spurious Fred has become the darling of the neo-nazis, holocaust deniers and the 57 varieties of flake that inhabit this planet.
The crematoria, he implied, were simply bomb shelters. I would now like to invite him to help me solve a problem as only someone of his scientific standing can. So, here is an open invitation to Frederick Leuchter, late of the human race.
Dear Fred, You implied that the crematoria were bomb shelters. But Fred, by your own admission, they were built in 1942, when the Germans still controlled over half of Soviet Russia and that there was as much chance of Auschwitz being bombed as of Adolf Hitler dining at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Are you aware that what you are really saying is that Der Ubermenschen already knew that they were inferior to the Russians and that they were doomed to defeat?
You also said in your report that there was no provision for ventilation in the crematoria, which you argue would have been necessary if the SS guards were to survive the residual cyanide gas while removing corpses. How, then, were the guards in the 'bomb shelter' supposed to breathe if there was no ventilation. Schnorkels?
Finally, and most importantly, if it was a bomb shelter, just what or who was it meant to protect? The guards you say. But Fred, if the guards were in the bomb shelter, who was looking after the prisoners? I mean, what was to stop them escaping while the Ubermensch were seeking shelter from Der sturm?