Ernst Zündel (sentenced Germany 150295 b)

The International Campaign for Real
History

Canada
Press Thursday,
February 15, 2007

Right-wing activist Ernst Zündel sentenced to 5
years for Holocaust denial

[Ernst Zündel February 2007]

MANNHEIM, Germany (AP) –
Far-right activist
Ernst Zündel was convicted of
14 counts of incitement Thursday,
[February 15, 2007] for Holocaust denial and sentenced to the maximum five years in prison.

The 67-year-old, who was deported from
Canada in 2005, was accused of years of anti-Semitic activities, including denying the Holocaust a crime in Germany in documents and on the Internet. Zündel and his supporters have argued that he is a peaceful campaigner denied his right to free speech.

Zündel has been a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier since the
1970s.

He ran Zündel ran Samisdat
Publishers, a leading distributor of Nazi propaganda based in Canada. Zündel also provided content to The
Zündelsite website, which has followers around the world, hundreds of whom have protested his detention.

Zündel was born in Germany in
1939. He came to Canada in 1958 and lived in Toronto and Montreal until 2001.
Canadian officials rejected his attempts to obtain citizenship in 1966 and
1994.

He then moved to Tennessee, where he married fellow extremist Ingrid
Rimland, but was deported to Canada in
2003 for alleged immigration violations.
[Website note:
since when he has been held in jail, four years in custody which the German courts have refused to offset against his prison sentence.]

Upon arrival
in Toronto, Zündel was arrested
and held in detention until a judge
ruled in March 2005 that his activities
posed a
threat
to national and international
security, and he
was deported to Germany.

That decision was welcomed by Jewish and anti-Nazi groups in Canada and elsewhere.

Zündel has been standing trial in
Germany since November of last year in what were, at times, raucous proceedings.

The initial attempt to try him collapsed last March over a dispute with one of his attorneys, Sylvia
Stolz.

At one stage she had to be carried from the courtroom, screaming “Resistance! The
German people are rising up,” after defying an order banning her from the trial on grounds she tried to sabotage the proceedings by denouncing the court as a
“tool of foreign domination.” In the current trial, defence attorney Ludwig
Bock quoted from Adolf Hitler’s
“Mein Kampf” and from Nazi race laws in his closing statements last week as argued for Zündel’s acquittal.

Bock accused the Mannheim state court of not wanting to face a “scientific analysis” of the Holocaust and charged that prosecutors one of whom has termed
Zündel a “rat catcher” had defamed his client.

Another of Zündel’s five attorneys, Herbert Schaller, above, told the court that all of its evidence that the Holocaust took place was based only on witness reports, instead of hard facts.

[Andreas Grossmann]In his own closing arguments, prosecutor
Andreas Grossmann, right,
called Zündel a “political con man” from whom the German people must be protected, widely quoting from his writings, which argue that millions of
Jews did not die at the hands of the
Nazis.

“You might as well argue that the sun rises in the west,” Grossmann said when asking that Zündel be given the maximum sentence. “But you cannot change that the Holocaust has been proven.”.

Our dossier on
Ernst Zündel

2004 flashback: Ernst
Zündel charged with incitement in
Germany

2005 flashback: “A
good investment” – Cost to Canadians of
sending Zündel to his native
Germany: $130,000.

“The cost of the
trip is not of great concern to members
of the Jewish community, said Bernie
Farber, executive director of the
Canadian Jewish Congress.”

The
above news item is reproduced without editing other
than typographical©
Focal Point
2007 write to David
Irving