What the forensic scientist said ("If I had known it was Auschwitz my results would have been different...")

JIM ROTH, CHEMIST, ALPHA ANALYTICAL LABORATORIES:-

From the soundtrack:  I don't think the Leuchter results have any meaning. There is nothing in any of our data that says those surfaces were exposed or not. Even after I got off the stand [witness stand at the Zündel trial] I didn't know where the samples came from. I didn't know which samples were which. It was only at lunch that I found out really what the case involved. Hindsight being 20/20, the test was not the correct one to have been used for the analysis. He presented us with rock samples anywhere from the size of your thumb up to half the size of your fist. We broke them up with a hammer so that we could get a sub-sample; placed it in a flask; add concentrated sulphuric acid; and it undergoes a reaction that it produces a red coloured solution. It is the intensity of this red colour that we can relate with cyanide concentration. You have to look at what happens to cyanide when it reacts with a wall. Where does it go? How far does it go? Cyanide is a surface reaction, it's probably not going to penetrate more than 10 microns a human hair is 100 microns in diameter.

Crush this sample up. I have just diluted that sample ten thousand, a hundred thousand times. If you are gonna go look for it you are going to look on the surface only. There's no reason to go deep because it is not going to be there. Which was the exposed surface? I didn't have any idea. That's like analysing paint on a wall, by analysing the timber that's behind it. If they go in with blinkers on, they will see what they want to see. What was he really trying to do? What was he trying to prove?

Above: The real picture today of an outside wall of a cyanide chamber in which clothing was fumigated at Auschwitz: analysis of the blue stain reveals colossal quantities of cyanide compounds. -- From The Germar Rudolf report