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Shot through with mordant humor but dominated by the grimly ironic spectacle of a man hoisting himself by his own petard, Errol Morris weaves together a tale of ignorance, self-deception, and vanity as he scrutinizes the bizarre career of, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. an execution specialist whose self belief and ostentatious testimony in which he sought to deny the holocaust would ultimately destroy his career Growing up in the American prison system, where his father was an employee, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. literally stumbled into his first position as the individual who perfected the electric chair, helping make capital punishment run more smoothly. This improvement convinced other prisons that he could make the same adjustments to their lethal injections, gas chambers, and gallows. And soon, Leuchter was the country's predominant expert on the maintaining and designing of execution equipment. The trial of one Ernst Zundel would change all of this, however.Charged in Canada with the publishing of historical lies in the form of a pamphlet which denied the Holocaust and proposed that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were an invention by Jewish sympathizers, Zundel needed the support of an expert who could prove his theory. Leuchter traveled to Poland (on his honeymoon!) and collected samples from various sites to prove, for himself, whether or not these chambers existed. His results, which appeared to everyone except the revisionists and himself as being utterly ridiculous and inaccurate, ruined his marriage, personal life, and career in the penal system. All of this due to his stubborn belief that everything he did was perfect and unflinching. An ultimately fascinating documentary about a truly sad story.