Frei, Max

Max Frei

Max Frei thought so. He thought pollen spores imbedded in the cloth might be used to determine where the cloth had been.

Frei was a highly respected criminalist who had headed up the Zurich Police Scientific Laboratory for many years. He retired in 1972 but continued to work as a consultant. The year after he retired and again in 1978, he was given the opportunity to take some sample dust from the surface of the shroud for examination. The dust was visible to the naked eye but it would take a microscope to see what was in that dust. Modern forensic science was about to meet the shroud, to look for trace evidence that might tell something of its provenance.

When Frei started his career shortly after World War II, police science labs were relatively new. Only sixteen years earlier, the United States Bureau of Investigation had set up a one-room technical laboratory in temporary space in Old Southern Railway Building in Washington, D.C. The lab’s one and only scientist, Special Agent Charles Appel, had equipped the lab with a microscope borrowed from Bausch and Lomb, an ultraviolet light for detecting blood, a special device for examining gun barrels and a small photographic darkroom setup that was less sophisticated then the home darkrooms of many pre-war hobbyists. In 1942, the same year that Max Frei started at the newly created Zurich lab, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the technical laboratory was christened the FBI Crime Laboratory. But it was still a small laboratory, one of very few labs in the newly evolving field of forensic science.

By 1973, forensics science was a well developed field with many specialties. Skilled technicians at the FBI lab were matching finger prints found at crime scenes to vast card files of fingerprint records.  They were matching typewriters to typed documents. They were matching teeth to dental records. Chemists were analyzing paper and ink, blood and all manner of substances. Microscopists were identifying trace evidence; tiny bits of plants and animals and minerals, bits of stuff so small that it could only be seen with optical microscopes or a relatively new device called the scanning electron microscope. The SEM scans tiny objects with a beam of electrons rather than by magnifying the light reflected from or passing through a specimen. A common method of collecting trace evidence was to use clear, adhesive tape pressed to a surface, a technique that the annals of forensic science usually credits to Max Frei in 1950.

Pollen Identification

One of the trace evidence specialties was pollen identification and Frei, trained as a biologist, was a renowned expert. He collected his samples from the shroud with sticky tape and then took them to his lab in Zurich. As historian Ian Wilson describes it:

Back in his laboratory in Zurich, Frei surveyed the dust he had collected under the microscope. His trained eye immediately identified mineral particles, fragments from hairs and fibers of plants, spores from bacteria and nonflowering plants such as mosses and fungi, and pollen grains from flowering plants-all consistent with the sort of microscopic debris the Shroud could be expected to have accumulated over the centuries. Being chiefly a botanist by training, Frei found the pollen to be of the greatest interest. As he was aware, pollen grains have an extremely resistant outer wall, the exine. Although so small as to be virtually invisible to the naked eye, these grains can and do retain their physical characteristics for literally hundreds of millions of years, being immune to almost any form of destruction. As Frei was also aware, when viewed under the [scanning] electron microscope pollen grains vary so considerably in physical characteristics that, thanks to careful classification of the different types over the years, it is possible to identify with certainty the precise genus of plant from which any grain has been derived. Frei realized that identification of the plants from which the pollen on the Shroud had been derived could lead to important deductions about the geographical regions in which the Shroud had been. (33)

Scanning Electron Microscope

But, as we now have come to realize, Frei may not have used the scanning electron microscope for identifying any of the pollen on the shroud. He never said that he did but implied it. Captions in photographs contained wording such as “pollen types found on the Shroud.” It is doubtful that there are any SEM photos of pollen actually found on the shroud. We have come to realize that some species that Frei identified, could not be identified with only an ordinary light microscope. It was a rhetorical sleight of hand.

What Frei reported was extraordinary. He identified fifty-eight different plants, many from the environs of Jerusalem and areas in Turkey that coincided nicely with Edessa and Constantinople. Those who were looking for confirmation of the shroud’s authenticity were ecstatic. Skeptics, on the other hand, were looking for holes.

One line of attack was to find fault, not with the science, but the man. Frei, it was reported, had made a mistake, a very embarrassing mistake that had absolutely nothing to do with the shroud or with pollen evidence.

Attacking Frei

In an interview with John C. Snider, the editor of SciFiDimensions, a science fiction magazine Joe Nickell  responded to a question about the pollen evidence:

Max Frei was a Swiss criminologist - a sort of jack-of-all-trades criminologist - who made a fool of himself authenticating the notorious Hitler Diaries. . . . The pollens were very suspicious, as pollen experts quickly pointed out . . . . they all looked brand-spanking new - they looked like lab specimens. (34) 

Nickell had missed the obvious. Some of the photographs were lab specimens. They were labeled as such. Granted, Frei should have made it clear. But the argumentum ad hominem, the argument against the man, the suggestion that he made a fool of himself, was unwarranted. In that interview with Nickell that we mentioned at the outset of the book, the one were Nickell told Krieg of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, as a way of elevating his qualifications, that he was a “jack of all trades,” Nickell also told Krieg that he was an “undercover detective, teacher, draft dodger, river boat manager, carnival promoter, magician and spokesperson.” He was also an unfair tarnisher of reputations. He had questioned Ray Rogers integrity and he would try to do the same to Frei.

Frei was multi-disciplined. He knew pollens and he knew handwriting analysis and many other specialties. We would expect that from a former director of a forensic science laboratory. The charge that he “made a fool of himself authenticating the notorious Hitler Diaries” is pure exaggeration. In 1981, the publisher of Der Stern, a German news magazine bought several volumes of a handwritten diary supposedly written by Adolf Hitler. It was understood that the diary had been in East Germany since the end of World War II after a plane carrying some of Hitler’s personal possessions had crashed near Dresden. As the story goes, farmers had recovered the diary in the wreckage and passed them on to an East German general. They were subsequently smuggled into West Germany hidden in pianos by a certain Dr. Fischer. Fischer approached Gerd Heidemann, a journalist for Der Stern, who acted as a middleman between Fischer and the magazine.

Der Stern

Der Stern had been skeptical at first but eventually became convinced that they were genuine. Having bought them, by various accounts for somewhere between two and four million dollars, they announced their acquisition. Newsweek and The Times (of London) were trying to buy them. The Times requested that they be examined by Ordway Hilton, a document specialist from South Carolina, and Frei, also a well respected expert in document verification. Using a sample of Hitler’s handwriting provided by the West German Federal Archives, Hilton and Frei concluded that they were indeed written by Hitler. But they were not. The problem, as it was later discovered, was that the sample from the archives was also a forgery created by the same forger who had forged the Hitler Diaries, Konrad Kujau.  Later, it was discovered that the paper had been manufactured after 1953. Tests on the inks used for the diary showed that it had only been on the paper for about one year. But Hilton and Frei had only been asked to compare the handwriting. They had done that correctly from the samples at hand. The task of doing chemical analysis had fallen to another laboratory. 

All of this is not to criticize Joe Nickell. Depending on which accounts of this small bit of history you read, and when you read it, you might get a different collection of facts and different interpretations. Indeed that was so with what was being reported about Frei’s work.

Baruch was Guarded

But Baruch was guarded in his reporting. He confirmed what Frei had observed but at the genus level and not a species level. That wasn’t very helpful for it greatly expanded the geographic area. A flower particular to a specific area in Frei’s interpretation might be found elsewhere in the world in places that even the greatest conspiracy theorists never thought to imagine that the shroud might have ever been.  Sadly, these concerns were ignored by many people who poured out web page after web page trying to prove that the shroud was real. Finally, in 1991, Danin clarified his position on the pollen evidence. It could not be used to show that the shroud had been in the Middle East. He did, however, argue that his identification of plant images on the shroud was sufficient. Was it?

I have yet to personally meet anyone who denies that there is an image of a man on the shroud. However, in cyberspace I have. One day I received an email from someone who claimed that what we think is an image is merely the happenstance accumulation of smudges and stains on the cloth. It was, he wrote, no different than an imaginary image of Jesus on a burned slice of toast or the Virgin Mary in the grain of a plank of wood. But, I wrote back, the image is too detailed, too realistic and too complex to be that. It is obviously an image of a man, whether real or fake.  But he persisted. His mind was made up. “You can’t prove it,” he wrote back. It could be pure coincidence. It raised an interesting question. Is there a threshold for perceiving an image?

Ian Wilson

Back in his laboratory in Zurich, Frei surveyed the dust he had collected under the microscope. His trained eye immediately identified mineral particles, fragments from hairs and fibers of plants, spores from bacteria and nonflowering plants such as mosses and fungi, and pollen grains from flowering plants-all consistent with the sort of microscopic debris the Shroud could be ex-pected to have accumulated over the centuries. Being chiefly a botanist by training, Frei found the pollen to be of the greatest interest. As he was aware, pollen grains have an extremely resistant outer wall, the exine. Although so small as to be virtually invisible to the naked eye, these grains can and do retain their physical characteristics for literally hundreds of millions of years, being immune to almost any form of destruction. As Frei was also aware, when viewed under the [scanning] electron microscope pollen grains vary so considerably in physical characteristics that, thanks to careful classification of the different types over the years, it is possible to identify with certainty the pre-cise genus of plant from which any grain has been de-rived. Frei realized that identification of the plants from which the pollen on the Shroud had been derived could lead to important deductions about the geographical regions in which the Shroud had been.

Joe Nickell

Max Frei was a Swiss criminologist - a sort of jack-of-all-trades criminologist - who made a fool of himself authenticating the notorious Hitler Diaries. . . . The pollens were very suspicious, as pollen experts quickly pointed out . . . . they all looked brand-spanking new - they looked like lab specimens.