An American death-penalty expert, who claims gas chambers were not used in Nazi death camps to kill millions of Jews during World War II, has been arrested in Germany on charges of inciting racism, police said Friday.
Fred A. Leuchter Jr., 49, of Malden, Mass., was taken into custody one hour before he was to appear on a television talk show Thursday evening to discuss his theory.The state prosecutor's office in Mannheim said it ordered Leuchter's arrest on suspicion he would use the TV show to incite racism and to slander the memory of Holocaust victims.
There was no immediate word on whether Leuchter would be held for trial in Germany or deported to the United States.
Leuchter, who manufactures machines used to carry out the death sentence, including electric chairs, gas chambers and injection machines, gained prominence in 1988 when he wrote a paper supporting revisionist historians who say the Holocaust never happened.
He told a group of right-wing extremists in Germany in 1991 that the mass murder of Jews at the Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek death camps in Poland was not technically possible at the time. He was deported from Britain that same year after entering the country illegally to give another speech.
Leuchter presented himself as a professional engineer while working as a designer and consultant for U.S. prison systems. But he was forced to sign an agreement in 1991, which Holocaust survivor groups called a victory, acknowledging that he did not have an engineering license.
Talk show host Margarethe Schreinmakers called his arrest Friday an "act of censorship."
"I wanted to interview Leuchter about the topic of being a professional killer and spent a great deal of time preparing so I could unmask his political claims," she said.