The Evidence of the Prussian Blue

by Dr. William L. Pierce
From National Vanguard magazine issue No. 110, March-April 1989:

Fred Leuchter, of Boston, Massachusetts, is an engineer -- a very special sort of engineer. His specialty is the technology of putting condemned prisoners to death. He knows everything there is to know about electric chairs, gallows, and gas chambers. His consulting firm, Fred A. Leuchter Associates, is the only one of its kind in the United States, and he is the man who is called on whenever a new prison with an execution facility is built or an old one is refurbished.

One of his recent jobs was the design of a new gas chamber for the Missouri State Penitentiary, in Jefferson City. Another was a forensic examination of the alleged "gas chambers" in the former concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, all in Poland, where Jews have been claiming for the last 44 years that millions of their brethren perished at the hands of the German occupying force during the Second World War.

Mr. Leuchter got that last job when he was hired as an expert witness by Ernst Zundel, a Canadian of German birth on trial by the Canadian government for disseminating "false news." Under an obscure and heretofore unused Canadian law which makes it a penal offense to publish information the publisher knows to be false, Zundel was being prosecuted for reprinting and distributing a booklet, Did Six Million Really Die?, which presents evidence countering the Jewish claim that six million Jews were gassed to death in the so-called "Holocaust." The charges had been brought against him in 1983 at the insistence of Jews in Canada, and he had been convicted in 1985. On appeal he had won a new trial, which began in January 1988.(For information on Ernst Zundel's first trial, see NATIONAL VANGUARD No. 99, p. 21; and No. 103, p. 15.)

During Zundel's first trial a great deal of evidence had been presented by the defense team to establish the factuality of Did Six Million Really Die? Persons who had been at Auschwitz during the war testified about the actual conditions there; others pointed out some of the gross inconsistencies in the "Holocaust" tale or presented evidence of the torture of German camp guards after the war in order to extract "confessions" from them. And several witnesses who had examined the alleged "gas chambers" at Auschwitz and other concentration camps in Poland testified that it was extremely unlikely that they had ever been used for executing Jews: their design and construction were totally unsuited for their alleged purpose.

The jurors, however, previously saturated with fictionalized media portrayals of concentration camps, German brutality against blameless Jews, and other facets of the "Holocaust" story, decided to believe what they had seen and heard on television instead of the evidence presented in the courtroom.

The defense aim in the second trial was to present more evidence of the same kind as in the first trial, but to make it more credible, and it was for this purpose that Fred Leuchter was engaged. As an unimpeachable expert on the design and functioning of gas chambers, he could visit the concentration camp sites, gather evidence, and then tell the jury whether or not it was feasible for the Germans to have gassed the millions of Jews claimed by the propagandists for the "Holocaust."

It was anticipated by the defense team that Leuchter's evidence would establish two essential points: First, the structures designated by the Jews as "gas chambers" were utterly inadequate for that function, and one would have to believe the Germans the world's most incompetent engineers if they had indeed constructed them for executing Jews with poison gas. This point was to be made more compelling by comparing the alleged gas chambers with the real gas chambers -- i.e., the delousing chambers for killing the lice on the clothing and other personal belongings of the prisoners -- which existed in each camp. The latter, quite obviously too small to have been used for mass executions of prisoners, were designed and constructed by knowledgeable engineers to serve their intended function in the most efficient manner. So why did the Germans build preposterously unsuitable and inefficient gas chambers for killing Jews and highly efficient gas chambers for killing lice, all in the same camp?

The second point to be made was that, even if the Germans had gassed and cremated Jews in the designated facilities in the concentration camps, they could not possibly have killed anything near the number of Jews claimed in the "Holocaust" propaganda; the facilities simply were not adequate for the task.

It was with these considerations in mind that Leuchter, accompanied by a draftsman, a photographer, and a Polish interpreter, departed for Poland in February 1988 to gather his evidence. The evidence he actually found there, however, was far more persuasive than Zundel or his defense team could have hoped for. It was evidence which would punch an irreparable hole in the "Holocaust" myth.

That evidence was presented to the world when Leuchter was called to the witness stand on April 20, 1988 -- an auspicious date indeed. Leuchter told the court about his observations and measurements of the buildings allegedly used for putting more than two million Jews to death between 1941 and 1944 with deadly Zyklon B. He repeated, with more detail and authority, the conclusions of other witnesses who had examined these alleged "gas chambers."

Then he dropped his bombshell. He had also gathered, he revealed to the court, a number of samples of material scraped from the walls, floors, and ceilings of the various buildings claimed to be used for gassing Jews to death, and also from the interior of a genuine delousing chamber at the Birkenau camp. He had submitted these samples for analysis to an independent testing laboratory, Alpha Analytical Laboratories, of Ashland, Massachusetts. He and the witness who followed him, Dr. James Roth, manager of the aforenamed laboratory, described the significance of the samples.

Zyklon B, the poison the Jews claim was used to reduce their population by several million (2.5 million at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone) during the Second World War, consists of hydrogen cyanide, the active ingredient, in a granular carrier of diatomaceous earth. It was widely used before the war as a pesticide and was exported by several German manufacturers to other countries, including the United States. And it actually was used in substantial quantities in the concentration camps during the war, primarily to delouse clothing and bedding. The eastern Jews were a notoriously filthy people, and many of them were infested with lice. Lice often are carriers of deadly typhus, and so the Germans were obliged to build delousing facilities in every camp intended for Jewish prisoners or workers.

Hydrogen cyanide (also known as hydrocyanic acid and prussic acid) is an efficient killer not only of lice, but of other living organisms as well. It is the deadliest poison in general use in commerce and industry. And it is the poison used for all gas chamber executions of prisoners in the United States, although for this purpose it is derived from other sources than Zyklon B.

Hydrogen cyanide itself is a volatile liquid, which vaporizes rapidly at room temperature and does its deadly work as a gas. It does have a tendency to cling to walls and other surfaces with which it comes in contact, however, especially if these surfaces are somewhat porous, as were the brick walls of the alleged execution chambers in the concentration camps. If the temperature of a surface is much below the boiling point of the liquid, 78 F, there may be actual condensation.

And it is a moderately reactive substance. In particular, it reacts with iron compounds to form ferro- and ferricyanides, which themselves are quite stable substances. Common red building brick gets its color from the iron oxide which it contains. Hydrogen cyanide, in either its gaseous or liquid form, in contact with such brick slowly reacts with the iron oxide to form a complex iron-cyanide compound, ferric ferrocyanide (also known as ferric hexacyanoferrate), which goes by several common names, including Berlin blue, Paris blue, Hamburg blue, and, most commonly, Prussian blue.

Prussian blue, used as a pigment in printing inks, paints, typewriter ribbons, and carbon paper, is a practically indestructible substance, nearly insoluble in water, dilute acids, and most organic solvents. Once formed in the surface layer of a brick, it remains there forever. If there is a sufficient concentration of it, it imparts its distinctive blue color to the brick.

It was this distinctive blue color which Leuchter immediately noticed on the brick walls of the delousing chamber at Birkenau -- but not on the walls of any of the alleged execution rooms, at either Birkenau or the other camps. The laboratory analyses of his scrapings revealed an extremely high concentration of cyanide (bound as Prussian blue) -- more than one part per thousand -- in the material from the wall of the Birkenau delousing chamber, but practically no cyanide in the material from the walls, floors, and ceilings of the rooms where literally millions of Jews are alleged to have been gassed.

Most of the "gas chamber" scrapings contained no detectable cyanide at all, within the limits of the analytical process used. The few scrapings which did yield a non-zero indication of cyanide contained a concentration consistent with a one-time delousing of the room with Zyklon B. In no case was this concentration as much as one per cent of that in the walls of the Birkenau delousing chamber.

The clear implication of these tests is that, in complete contradiction of Jewish "Holocaust" claims, Jews were not gassed in the concentration camps which they assert were "death camps," where a massive, continuing program of executions of Jewish prisoners with Zyklon B is alleged to have occurred. And this contradiction, so stark and clear-cut, casts an even greater pall of doubt than existed before over the whole Jewish story of a deliberate German campaign of extermination which took six million Jewish lives.

Jews, of course, will not abandon their "Holocaust" claims, no matter how tattered and discredited they become. Those claims already have yielded them a tidy profit: $50 billion in "guilt money" extorted from the people of West Germany alone. And they are the Jews' sole excuse for behavior -- in Palestine, America, Europe, and elsewhere -- which otherwise would be inexcusable by the Gentile world.

Nor will the "Holocaust" myth be abandoned by the politicians, bureaucrats, and media scribblers of the Western world, so many of whom are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the profiteers of that myth. Nor by the lunatic fringe of Christians, who worshipfully regard the Jews -- God's own people -- as infallible. Which is why Ernst Zundel was found guilty again by the Canadian court, on May 11, 1988.

There are in the world, however, sane, intelligent, and honest men of all ideological convictions. It is they who eventually will be persuaded by the evidence of the Prussian blue. And when they are persuaded, the Jews will be undone.