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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.
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.[1]
His first marriage ended in 1977 as his public notoriety grew.
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? 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.
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."[2]
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.
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