U.S. may boot Zündel out

Wife fears key could soon be thrown away

By Mark Bonokoski

FOR more than a year now, college students have been renting the old house on Carlton St. which was once the fortified bunker of infamous Holocaust denier, Ernst Zündel.

While he may be gone -- to Tennessee, and possibly his most serious trouble yet -- evidence of his former Cabbagetown presence is still intact.

A large security camera still pans the front entrance of his old home and office, just as it did the night the place was fire-bombed back in 1995. And all the windows remained barred.

The front gate, however, is no longer locked.

Other than that, nothing seems changed.

The building's new owner, in fact, claims she had no idea of the property's dubious history when she first bought it through a real-estate agent.

And, "it's nobody's business" how much she paid for it, she said.

Dial Zündel's last phone listing for that Carlton St. address and an automated voice informs the caller that the number has been changed, and then it provides a number for a phone that rings somewhere in a Smoky Mountain town south of Knoxville known as Sevierville, Tenn. (Pop: 11,500).

These past few days, however, Ernst Zündel has been unable to come to the phone.

[Robert Faurisson, Fred Leuchter at Carlton SAtreet; Zündel seated in background]

As friend and foe both now know, he's in a Blount County jail, about a hour's drive away from where his phone has been apparently ringing off the hook. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, it is alleged Zündel overstayed a visa, and while at least one newspaper reported Friday that his possible deportation will be to Canada, and not to his native Germany where the toughest anti-hate laws in the world now exist, this was not how it was being played out yesterday in the Zündel household.

When the phone rings there now, it is answered by Ingrid Rimland Zündel, his second wife, and caretaker of the Web site which recycles his anti-Semitic views, as well as Zündel's contention that the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany never happened and is therefore an historical lie.

But Ingrid Zündel did not want to talk.

"I'm not giving interviews to the mainstream press," she said, warning near the end of a brief conversation that the call was being taped.

"You are not fair. You smear people. You've been smearing people like Ernst Zündel for 40 years."

Well, not quite 40 years.

It was back in 1978, during the airing of a TV series on the Holocaust, that Ernst Zündel first fully appeared in Toronto, masquerading as the head of a group called the Concerned Parents of German Descent, which objected to the "steady diatribe of anti-German material" which the TV series supposedly helped propagate.

At face value, he had a point, and radio and newspaper reporters interviewed him at great length.

And then, on April 19, 1978, I wrote the column which took the mask off Ernst Zündel -- proving, among other things, that he used his middle names of Christof Friedrich to pen a 120-page book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, published in 1977 by White Power Publications out of Reedy, West Virginia.

Lauded in the right-wing Liberty Bell, a satellite publication of White Power, a reviewer wrote that "(Friedrich) leaves no doubt about it. Hitler was well loved and loved in return, but this relationship between the Leader and his people was not the gushy, sickly sweet effusion of an obese Jewish mother for her pimply, draft-dodging son. This was Aryan love. Strong, steady and uplifting."

It was the beginning of Zündel's troubles in Canada.

He has since failed twice to get Canadian citizenship, has been through the Canadian courts on various charges involving the spread of hate and lies, and was heavily fined in Germany for offending the memory of the dead and possession of illegal Nazi materials -- all which followed a 1991 visit to Munich.

Approximately three years ago, when his Toronto Web site was being scrutinized for spreading hate, he packed it up and moved to eastern Tennessee.

Reiterating that she would only talk to "alternative" newspapers, Ingrid Zündel said she was telling persistent callers from the "mainstream" media to go to her Web site to find out all they needed to know.

At noon yesterday, however, Ingrid Zündel was still running with the Germany card -- with no mention on her Web site of the recent reports that her husband could possibly be bound for Canada.

"In Germany, Holocaust denial is against the law," she writes. "I know this latest arrest is meant to deport Ernst to Germany on a technicality where he will be charged, sentenced and imprisoned without being allowed a defence.

"Once Ernst is convicted and imprisoned, somebody will make sure the key is thrown away," she continues. "I fear even worse could happen, and that his very life will be in jeopardy."

And then there is a plea for defence-fund support.

 [Index on Ernst Zündel]