Holocaust Denier Given Five-Year Prison Term by German Court
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
BERLIN — A German court sentenced Ernst Zündel, a Holocaust denier whose publications have included “The Hitler We Loved and Why,” to five years in prison for incitement of racial hatred.
Yesterday’s sentence, the maximum allowed under German law, follows the 67-year-old’s conviction by a regional court in the southern city of Mannheim on 14 counts of incitement, court spokeswoman Bettina Krenz said in a phone interview. One of the charges involved offense and slander to the memory of the dead.
The conviction was a success for authorities who sought to prosecute people who post denials of the Holocaust on Internet sites available in Germany. It is a crime in Germany to deny the Nazi regime’s killing of 6 million Jews.
The trial was delayed in November 2005 after the judge dismissed part of Mr. Zündel’s defense team. Mr. Zündel, a German citizen, was extradited from Canada two years ago. In a statement to the court yesterday, he called for an independent commission to be set up to establish the number of Jews killed by the Nazis, Agence France-Presse reported.
Born in Germany’s Black Forest region, Mr. Zündel left the country as a 19-year-old to avoid the draft. He spent the next two decades in Canada, where he began publishing neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic literature through his Samisdat Publishers Ltd., according to the U.S. Anti-Defamation League’s Web site.
Initially publishing under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich, Mr. Zündel began writing under his own name in 1978 when his identity was discovered. Samisdat published Holocaust-denial works such as Arthur Butz’s “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” and Austin App’s “The Six Million Swindle.”
Mr. Zündel’s own writings have ranged from neo-Nazi and white- supremacy tracts to a theory that the Nazis had developed a fleet of UFOs and concealed them in Antarctica, according to the Anti-Defamation League. An international conference for Holocaust deniers was held in his honor in Sacramento, Calif., in 2004.
For over a decade, Mr. Zündel has become a primary contributor to one of the main Holocaust-denial Web sites, Zundelsite.org, Ms. Krenz said.
Ms. Krenz said Mr. Zündel had moved to Tennessee with his wife in 2001, only to be arrested by immigration authorities and extradited to Canada two years later. The Canadian authorities, who had long wanted to prosecute Mr. Zündel, in turn submitted him to their German counterparts in 2005.
