Michael Shermer: Liar or idiot — you decide!

Please forward to Germar Rudolf.

Dear Germar:

I am Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine. I would like to ask you a few questions about your research. In Errol Morris’ film “Mr. Death,” he shows the fatal mistakes made by Fred Leuchter in his chemical analysis of the concrete and brick from numerous locations at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I would like to inquire if you made the same errors in your research and if not, how did your research take these problems into account:

  1. Since the gas chamber at Auschwitz 1 is a reconstruction, what would make him (or you) think that the particular section from which he chipped concrete was part of the original?
  2. The bricks at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau have been moved about the camp over the decades, some used by the locals to rebuild their homes. How can you be sure that the bricks you tested are from the actual gas chambers?
  3. Even if the bricks and concrete at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau were original, they have been exposed to half a century of brutal weathering. How did you adjust your findings accordingly?
  4. Leuchter chipped off huge chunks of concrete and brick and ground up the entire chunks into powder when they were analyzed (or, more to the point, the chemist whom he gave the samples to did because Leuchter didn’t tell him what they were), thereby diluting the Zyklon-B traces by hundreds of thousands of times. As you must know, Zyklon-B gas only penetrates about 10 microns into concrete (a human hair, by comparison, is 100 microns thick). What was your procedure for controlling for this problem?

Thank you for your attention.

Michael Shermer

[email protected]


Note: Others have responded to these questions from Shermer elsewhere, although one scarcely knows where to begin. Even after being exposed to the answers to these questions for years prior to the sending of this message, Shermer cannot or will not forsake his anti-revisionist bias in favor of skepticism. If as publisher of Skeptic magazine, Shermer is at the forefront of skeptics in the United States — if not the world — then skepticism is dead, as is independent thought.