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The International Fight for Real
History
In
October 1993 Fred
Leuchter
was invited to appear on a Cologne, Germany, television talk
show, Schreinemachers. As he entered the studio, German
police arrived to arrest him, and he was held in jail for
the next four weeks before being bailed to appear on charges
of breaking Germany’s new laws for the suppression of free
speech.
Advised that he would not be given a fair trial by
American standards by the German courts, he returned to the
United States at once. His escape chagrined the German
media, and on September 23 1994 The Week in Germany,
the newsletter of the German Information Center in
Washington issued this gloating release:
The
Week in
GermanySeptember 23,
1994
Politics
Germans
Want to Try Leuchter – If He Would Only Let Them
On September 14, a court in Mannheim (Baden-Württemberg) called off the trial of Fred A.
Leuchter, an American Holocaust “revisionist” widely admired in neo-Nazi circles, on charges of incitement.
Leuchter was arrested in October 1993 after delivering a speech in Weinheim (Baden-Württemberg) under the sponsorship of the right-wing extremist German National
Democratic Party (NPD: Nationaldemokratische Partei
Deutschlands).
In the speech, Leuchter summarized the arguments of the so-called “Leuchter Report,” his claim of
“proof” that the genocidal crimes perpetrated in the
Auschwitz concentration camp were technically infeasible.
Leuchter spent four weeks behind bars following his arrest; freed on DM 20,000 (U.S.$ 12,600) bail, he immediately left
Germany for the United States. His trial was called off last week after he failed to appear.
Charges against Leuchter were not dismissed, however, and it is possible that a new trial date will be set.
Leuchter’s German lawyer claimed that his client broke his promise to appear before the court because he did not believe that he would receive a fair trial. Public prosecutor Hans-Heiko Klein, meanwhile, ruled out the possibility of extradition, noting that Leuchter’s inflammatory pronouncements denying the Holocaust are not illegal in the United States.
Earlier this year, Germany’s constitutional court, the
Bundesverfassungsgericht, explicitly recognized denial of the Holocaust as anti-constitutional and hence as punishable under law (cf. TWIG 4/29/94, p. 2).
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Focal Point
1998 write to David Irving