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Date Posted: 01:35:00 06/11/06 Sun
Author: Colonel Angus
Subject: The Ernst Zündel Report (File A)

Ernst Zundel

AKA Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel

Born: April 24, 1939

Birthplace: Schwarzwald, Germany



Gender: Male

Ethnicity: White

Sexual orientation: Straight

Occupation: Activist

Nationality: Germany

Executive summary: Holocaust denier

Wife: Janick Larouche (m. 1960, div. 1977)

Son: Pierre

Son: Hans

Wife: Irene Margarelli (div. 1997)

Wife: Ingrid Rimland

Inciting Racial Hatred Nov-1981, charges dropped 1983

Fraud (publishing false news) convicted 26-Feb-1985, overturned 1987

Fraud (publishing false news) convicted 13-Nov-1988

Deported from the United States to Canada, Feb-2003



FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter (16-Sep-1999) Himself



Official Website:

http://www.zundelsite.org/

Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel (sometimes spelled Zundel or Zuendel) (born April 24, 1939 in Bad Wildbad) is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer who was jailed several times for publishing hate literature. In 1977, Zündel founded a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers which issued such pamphlets as The Hitler We Loved and Why and Did Six Million Really Die?, both prominent documents of the Holocaust Denial movement. On 5 February 2003, Ernst Zündel was detained by a U.S. local police and deported to Canada, where he was held two years in jail. He was then deported back to his native Germany and detained in Mannheim prison where he is awaiting the conclusion of his trial for Holocaust denial.

Background

Zündel emigrated to Canada from West Germany in 1958, when he was 19, in order to avoid being conscripted by the German military. He married a French-Canadian, Janick Larouche, in 1960 with whom he had two sons, Pierre and Hans. During the 1960s he came under the tutelage of Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand.

In the mid 1960s while living in Montreal he was an organizer among immigrants for the Ralliement des créditistes. In 1968 he joined the Liberal Party of Canada and ran in that year's leadership convention using it as a platform to allege that Canadian society was replete with anti-German attitudes. He dropped out of the contest prior to voting, but not before delivering his campaign speech to the convention.

Professionally, Zündel worked as a graphic artist and printer, on several occasions he was commissioned to illustrate covers for Maclean's Magazine. His views on Nazism and Jews were not well known in the 1960s and 1970s and he initially published his opinions under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.

As Christof Friedrich, he also authored several publications promoting the idea that UFOs are really secret weapons of Nazis who had fled to Neu-Schwabenland in Antarctica. The UFOs supposedly monitor the world and are part of a secret plan to re-conquer the world at an unspecified time. It could never be fully established whether he really believed these ideas himself or whether it was a publicity-stunt to gain both notoriety and funds for his other projects.

His first marriage ended in 1977 as his public notoriety grew.

Holocaust denial



Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (a.k.a. Richard Verrall), published by Ernst Zündel's Samisdat PublishersIn 1977, Zündel founded a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers which issued such pamphlets as The Hitler We Loved and Why and Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood a.k.a. Richard Verrall (a neo-Nazi member of the British National Front).

By the early 1980s, Samisdat Publications had grown into a worldwide distributor of Nazi and neo-Nazi posters, audiotapes, and memorabilia, as well as pamphlets and books devoted to Holocaust denial and Allied and Zionist "war crimes", claiming a mailing list of 29,000 in the United States alone. Advertisements for Samisdat Publications were purchased in well-known reputable American magazines and even comic books. West Germany became another large market, in violation of their Volksverhetzung (incitement of the masses) laws preventing Holocaust denial and dissemination of Nazi and neo-Nazi material, going so far as to send mass mailings to every member of the West German Bundestag (parliament). In December, 1980, the West German Federal Ministry of Finance told the Bundestag that between January, 1978, and December, 1979, "200 shipments of right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi content [including] books, periodicals, symbols, decorations, films, cassettes, [and] records" had been intercepted entering West Germany; these shipments "came overwhelmingly from Canada." On April 23, 1981, the West German government sent a letter to the Canadian Jewish Congress, confirming that the source of the material was Samisdat Publishers.

From 1981 to 1982 Zündel had his mailing privileges suspended by the Canadian government on the grounds that he had been using the mail to send hate propaganda, a criminal offence in Canada. Zündel then began shipping from a post office box in Niagara Falls, New York, until the ban on his mailing in Canada was lifted in January, 1983.

Trials

In 1983 Sabrina Citron, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, filed a private criminal complaint against Zündel before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In 1984, the Ontario government joined the criminal proceedings against Zündel based on Citron's complaint. Zündel was charged under the Criminal Code, section 177, of spreading false news for publishing "Did Six Million Really Die?".

Zündel underwent two criminal trials in 1985 and 1988. The charge against Zündel alleged that he "did publish a statement or tale, namely, "Did Six Million Really Die?" that he knows is false and that is likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance, contrary to the Criminal Code." Zündel was originally found guilty by two juries but was finally acquitted by the Supreme Court of Canada which held in 1992 that section 181 (formerly known as section 177) was a violation of the guarantees of freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Inspite of this aquital Zundel was forced to pay substantial legal fees.

The 1988 trial was notable for its reliance on testimony from individuals such as David Irving and Fred A. Leuchter, a self-styled expert in gas chambers. Luecther's testimony as an execution expert was accepted by the court, but his accompanying Luechter Report was excluded based on his lack of any engineering credentials. In 1985, key expert testimony against Zündel's alleged Holocaust denial was provided at great lengths by eminent Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg. Hilberg refused to testify at Zundel's 1988 trial. Zündel was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court; however, in 1992 in R. v. Zündel his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada when the law he had been charged under, reporting false news, was ruled unconstitutional.

In 1997, Zündel's marriage with his second wife, Irene Margarelli, collapsed after 18 months. "At one point I really loved him," she told an acquaintance. "By the end, I thought he was evil incarnate." She subsequently testifed against him in the late 1990s when he was under investigation by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for promoting hatred against Jews via his website. In January 2000, before the Commission had completed its hearings, he left Canada for Sevierville, Tennessee where he married his third wife, Ingrid Rimland and vowed never to return to Canada.

Detention and deportation

In 2003, Zündel was arrested in the United States for violating that country's immigration rules, specifically visa waiver overstay, which he argues was a "trumped up" charge. After two weeks he was deported; although he is a German citizen, a warrant for his arrest for Volksverhetzung (incitement of the masses) had been issued in Germany in the same year and he sought refugee status in Canada, despite the fact that his permanent residency status in Canada had expired owing to his prolonged absence from the country. At his hearing, Zündel described himself as "the Gandhi of the right".

On May 2, 2003, Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre and Solicitor General Wayne Easter issued a "national security certificate" against Zündel under the provisions of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, indicating that he was a threat to Canada's national security and/or the human rights of Canadian citizens owing to his alleged links with violent neo-Nazi groups including Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, neo-Nazi Christian Worch, and former Canadian Aryan Nations leader Terry Long, as well as Ewald Althans, convicted in a German court in 1995 of charges that included insulting the memory of the dead and insulting the state.

Zündel moved twice to have Canadian Federal Court justice Pierre Blais recuse himself from the case for "badgering and accusing the witness of lying" and exhibiting "open hostility" towards Zündel, and filed two constitutional challenges, one in the Ontario courts and one in the federal courts, all unsuccessful. During the hearing, Zündel characterized his position as "Sometimes I feel like a black man being convicted on Ku Klux Klan news clippings."

Zündel meanwhile moved to be released from detention on his own recognizance while the legal proceedings were ongoing. His lawyer, Doug Christie, introduced as a "surprise witness" Dr. Lorraine Day, a California doctor who practises alternative cancer treatments, to testify that Zündel's incarceration at Toronto's Metro West Detention Centre was causing his chest tumor (revealed to the court a few weeks previously) to grow and his blood pressure to rise, that the medication supplied to control his blood pressure was causing side-effects such as a slow heart rate and loss of memory, and that "He needs exercise, fresh air, and freedom from stress. The whole point is we need to have his high blood pressure controlled without the drug." On January 21, 2004, after three months of hearings including both public and secret testimony, Justice Blais again ruled against Zündel with a damning statement, reading in part:

The nature of the evidence, kept partly secret, and the fact that no cross-examination was possible for Mr. Zündel mean that I must be particularly careful in assessing the evidence presented and determining what weight it should be given...I wish to make it clear that the additional burden placed on the judge is not taken lightly. The information that was presented to me in camera was reviewed with intense scrutiny, and was carefully weighed, with an eye to the quality and number of sources of information.

That being said, I have come to the conclusion, based on the information presented to me in camera, that Mr. Zündel does represent a danger to the security of Canada, and should remain in detention for the time being. In writing the present reasons, I am constrained by the reality of national security reasons which impede giving full expression to the grounds for continuing the detention. However, to the extent that this is possible, I wish to explain a little further my reasons for maintaining the detention…

Mr. Zündel's activities have in large part been public. In the context of these public endeavours, Mr. Zündel has never advocated violence. This has been the basis of his position throughout the hearing. How can defending ideas, however unpopular or insulting, pose a safety concern for Canada? After all, argue his lawyers, Mr. Zündel has been repeating the same things for over twenty years, and he has never been prosecuted for any crime, including hate propaganda. He was charged with an offence - spreading false news - which the Supreme Court has since declared unconstitutional. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has ordered him to change the content of the Zündelsite [the Web site operated by Zündel's wife, Ingrid Rimland] but, again according to his lawyers, a regulatory offence hardly amounts to a threat to national security.

However, there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Zündel is a danger to national security or to the safety of any person. Although Mr. Zündel has virtually no history or direct personal engagement in acts of serious violence, his status within the White Supremacist Movement is such that adherents are inspired to carry out his acts in pursuance of his ideology. The Ministers believe that by his comportment as leader and ideologue, Mr. Zündel intends serious violence to be a consequence of his influence…

Mr. Zündel wields much more power within the right-wing, extremist and violent movement known as the White Supremacist Movement …than he lets on. He would have us believe that he is only interested in ideas, and that others use his ideas as they see fit, a situation for which he cannot be responsible.

The information made available to me paints an entirely different picture. Mr. Zündel is not the avuncular figure looking on with some indulgence on the wayward excesses of some misguided souls who fail to understand his message of non violence. The evidence points to his own direct involvement with groups he pretends to know very little about…

Mr. Zündel represents a threat that far exceeds simple guilt by association…

The Ministers have provided considerable evidence, that cannot be disclosed for reasons of national security, that Mr. Zündel has extensive contacts within the violent racist and extremist movement. Mr. Zündel stated in his testimony that he knew the following people slightly, or had professional contacts with them, or had interviewed them as a reporter. Information showed, rather, that he had dealt with them a great deal more, in some cases had funded their activities, and generally had maintained much closer ties than what he had admitted to in his examination or cross-examination. These contacts include Tom Metzger, Richard Butler, Dennis Mahon and William Pierce in the United States, Christian Worch, Ewald Althans, Gottfied Kuessel and Oliver Bode in Germany, Siegfried Verbeke in Belgium, Terry Long, Christopher Newhook, Tony McAleer, Bernard Klatt, Wolfgang Droege and Marc Lemire in Canada, Nick Griffin in Great Britain and members of South Africa's Afrikaner Resistance Movement.

Mr. Zündel knows Wolfgang Droege, another "acquaintance" and co-founder of the Heritage Front. Mr. Droege, before coming to Canada and founding the Heritage Front, was convicted and sentenced to three years' imprisonment in the United States for an attempted coup on Dominica. Mr. Zündel maintains that he and Mr. Droege only discussed history matters. I find this difficult to believe, if only because of frequent contacts with Mr. Droege and the latter's rather active role in terrorist activities.

Mr. Zündel would have us believe that he knew Marc Lemire for the "photocopying work" Mr. Lemire did for him. Yet Marc Lemire has been and still is very active in Heritage Front, which he now leads, and an active participant in internet services, notably the "Freedom Site" which offers links to extreme rightwing groups of Canada. Marc Lemire has in fact received financial assistance from Mr. Zündel, and again, I believe the nature of their relationship is much closer than what Mr. Zündel admits. I find somewhat unbelievable that they would never have discussed any matter related to Heritage Front or the internet, given their presence in cyberspace through various sites. Similarly, I believe Mr. Zündel had more extensive contacts with Bernard Klatt, a computer expert who provided internet services to various extremist groups, than what Mr. Zündel stated.

It is obvious that Mr. Zündel has provided a pale reflection of the real relationship he has had for decades with the individuals named above and others identified in the documents filed as evidence by the Ministers, individuals who have been involved in violent, criminal activities. One finds in their words and actions always present a common thread: hatred of Jews, hatred of nonwhite minorities, a claim that Whites are threatened by our multicultural society. Mr. Zündel may deny that he advocates violence, but he cannot deny that he espouses the same ideas as extremist violent groups. The information provided in camera by the Ministers to this Court goes further: Mr. Zündel in many cases pulls the strings that lead to violent actions.

I am convinced that Mr. Zündel was well aware of the outcome of his publications and public comments. Moreover, he knew in advance when certain activities, actions, demonstrations would occur, where skinhead elements would be involved with little restraint or indeed, with encouragement from the more staid members of the movement who would pretend not to know and not to approve of those actions. Not only did he know ahead of time, he was often involved in the planning…

The constraints of national security have made the Ministers unable to show public evidence to link Mr. Zündel to any of the violent acts that have been committed by extremist, racist groups. The information that has been provided to me, however, has satisfied me that there are reasonable grounds to believe that such a link exists. I am also satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to believe that if Mr. Zündel were freed from detention, he would be able to reestablish links with groups that present a threat to the security of Canada.

On February 24, 2005, Justice Blais ruled that Canada could deport Zündel back to his native Germany at any time, and on February 25 Zündel's lawyer, Peter Lindsay, announced that his client would not attempt to obtain a stay against the deportation and that his fight to remain in Canada was over. In his decision, Justice Blais noted that Zündel had had the opportunity to respond to the allegations of the decision of January 21 by explaining the nature of his contacts with the extremists mentioned and/or providing exonerating witnesses, but had failed to do so; he went on to say, in part:

Pursuant to the Security Intelligence Report of which Mr. Zündel was provided a summary, White Supremacists are defined as racists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites who use violence to achieve their political objectives. Leading White Supremacists may inspire others to use or threaten use of violence. Mr. Zündel is viewed by White Supremacists as a leader of international significance and was viewed as the patriarch of the Movement in Canada for decades. Mr. Zündel is one of the world's most prominent distributors of revisionist neo-Nazi propaganda through the use of facsimiles, courier, telephone, mail, media, shortwave radio transmissions, satellite videos and the Internet, through his website the Zundelsite, which is a platform for financing and contains White Supremacist documents as well as hyperlinks to other White Supremacist websites. The Security Intelligence Report concludes that based on the evidence that has been provided, Mr. Zündel is playing a critical role in the Movement, both in Canada and internationally.

Documents issued by Mr. Zündel over the years show his intention to destabilize the legal and legitimate democratic government of Germany. The evidence also demonstrates a clear determination to disseminate copious amounts of documentation and information from Canada to Germany, using Canadian soil to advance his goal of undermining the German government.

Furthermore, the Ministers have provided public and in camera evidence that Mr. Zündel has extensive involvement with contacts within the violent, racist, right wing movement. These contacts encompass individuals and organizations in Canada and abroad.

Mr. Zündel has always supported the ideology of the White Supremacist Movement, one which is based on the fundamental belief that the white race is an endangered species in need of protection as a result of non-Whites and Jews seeking to attack the foundation of western civilization. Blacks in particular are seen as intellectually inferior, while Jews are viewed as conspiring to gain control of the world through manipulation of financial markets, the spread of communism, pornography and general moral degeneracy. The government is viewed with suspicion as it is seen to be controlled by a Jewish conspiracy referred to as zionist occupation government (ZOG). These fundamental beliefs lead to antisemitic, racist, anti-immigration, anti-democratic, anti-human rights and anti-homosexual attitudes.

The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s is notoriously well known; what is less known, is the Canadian version which was developed over the 1940s and the 1950s under Adrien Arcand, who promoted Hitler as a saviour of Christianity and formed the Parti national social chrétien in the 1930s. That party then merged with the Canadian Nationalist Party from the West to form the National Unity Party. Later in the 1960s, the Canadian Nazi Party became the National Socialist Party and Mr. Zündel explained how he was influenced by Mr. Arcand himself whom he met when he arrived in Canada in the 1950s. At the conclusion of World War II, the enthusiasm of those Nazi parties around the world was greatly reduced; nevertheless, there still remained some desire to support this neo-Nazi approach. Mr. Zündel is among the few people that worked hard to maintain that support and who went to great lengths to try and establish some credibility to the neo-Nazi movement. He also tried by all means possible to develop and maintain a global network of all groups that have an interest in the same right wing extremist neo-Nazi mind-set.

The Ministers filed as evidence a document by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), entitled The Heritage Front Affair Report. The Ministers zeroed in on a particular part of this report and I quote:

Finally, we would like to put on the record our unshakeable conviction that the Government of Canada, through all means at its disposal, should continue to ensure that it is always aware of what is going on within extreme right wing racist and Neo-Nazi groups. Canadians should never again repeat the mistakes of the past by underestimating the potential for harm embodied in hate-driven organizations. (Section 13.12 of the SIRC document)

Zündel was deported to Germany on March 1, 2005. Upon his arrival at Frankfurt airport, he was immediately arrested and detained in Mannheim prison awaiting trial for inciting racial hatred.

German trial

German prosecutors charged Zündel on July 19, 2005, with fourteen counts of inciting racial hatred. The indictment says Zündel "denied the fate of destruction for the Jews planned by National Socialist powerholders and justified this by saying that the mass destruction in Auschwitz and Treblinka, among others, were an invention of the Jews and served the repression and blackmail of the German people."

His trial was scheduled for five days beginning November 8, 2005, but ran into an early delay when Judge Ulrich Meinerzhagen ruled that Horst Mahler, whose license to practice as a lawyer was withdrawn in 2004 and who, in January 2005, was sentenced to nine months in prison for inciting racial hatred, could not be part of the defense team. Mahler had been associated with the violent far-left Red Army Faction in the 1970s, but has since become a supporter of far-right and anti-Semitic groups. Zündel's public defender Sylvia Stolz was also dismissed, on the grounds that her written submissions to the court included Mahler's ideas. On November 15, 2005, Meinerzhagen announced that the trial will be rescheduled in order to allow new counsel time to prepare.


The trial resumed on February 9, 2006 for several court sessions but then adjourned on March 9 when the trial judge asked for Stolz to be removed as Zündel's defence lawyer after having denounced the court as a "tool of foreign domination" and described the Jews as an "enemy people". On March 31 the the superior state court in Karlsruhe removed Stolz from the case for illegally obstructing proceedings "with the sole goal of sabotaging the trial . . . and making it into a farce".

The trial is expected to resume on June 9, 2006.

Zündel's ancestry

According to Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski, Zündel's mother was Gertrude Mayer and his maternal grandparents were Nagal and Isador (Izzy) Mayer. Izzy Mayer was a union organizer for the garment industry in the Bavarian town of Augsburg.

According to Bonokoski, Ernst's ex-wife Irene Zündel said that the possibility of being at least part-Jewish bothered Zündel so much that he returned to Germany in the 1960s in search of his family's Ariernachweis, a Nazi-era certificate of pure Aryan blood, but was unable to find any such document for his family.

In 1997, Zündel granted an interview to Tsadok Yecheskeli of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that includes the following exchange:

Yecheskeli: Are you sure there's no Jewish blood in your family?

Zündel (in hushed voice): No.

Quotes

About Ernst Zündel:

"If Ernst Zündel is a refugee, Daffy Duck is Albert Einstein... Some propositions are so ludicrous that they are a betrayal of common sense and human dignity if allowed a moment's oxygen." —Rex Murphy

"Mr. Zündel's activities are not only a threat to Canada's national security, but also a threat to the international community of nations." —Canadian Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais

By Ernst Zündel:

"I have always seen blunders in my life not as stumbling blocks, but as stepping stones."

"The Jews of the world have a Holocaust coming, and all the gruesome lies that they have told about people like Germans during the Second World War—all those grotesque Spielberg-like distortions of what really took place—one day will come back to haunt Jews, and I want to not be around when that happens."

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