Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel (; 24 April 1939 – 5 August 2017) was a German"Zundel won't appeal deportation, lawyer says", CTV.ca, February 6, 2005 (accessed July 26, 2008): Canadian Justice Pierre Blais denounced Zundel as a Hitler sympathizer determined to propagate the neo-Nazi movement neo-Nazi publisher and pamphleteer of Holocaust denial literature."Ernst Zundel", Anti-Defamation League (accessed July 26, 2008) He was jailed several times: in Canada for publishing literature "likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group", and on charges of being a threat to national security; in the United States, for overstaying his visa; and in Germany for charges of "inciting racial hatred". He lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000.
In 1977, Zündel founded a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers, which issued neo-Nazi pamphlets such as his co-authored The Hitler We Loved and Why and Richard Verrall's Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last, which were both significant documents to the Holocaust denial movement.
On 5 February 2003, Ernst Zündel was detained by local police in the U.S. and deported to Canada, where he was detained for two years on a security certificate for being a foreign national considered a threat to national security pending a court decision on the validity of the certificate. Once the certificate was upheld, he was deported to Germany and tried in the state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement of Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s. On February 15, 2007, he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison. All these imprisonments and prosecutions were for inciting hatred against an identifiable group. He was released on March 1, 2010.
Early life Zündel was born in Calmbach (now part of Bad Wildbad) in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in 1939 and was raised mostly by his mother, Gertrude. According to Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski, Zündel's mother was Gertrude Mayer, the daughter of Isadore and Nagal Mayer. Isadore Mayer was a trade union organizer for the garment industry in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. According to Bonokoski, Ernst's ex-wife, Irene Zündel, claimed that the possibility of being at least partly Jewish bothered Zündel so much that he returned to Germany in the 1960s in search of his family's Ariernachweis, a Third Reich certificate of pure Aryan blood, but was unable to find any such document.
In 1997, Zündel granted an interview to Tsadok Yecheskeli of the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, in which he acknowledged that he "had a little fright there in the '60s" as to whether he might have had Jewish ancestry through his grandfather Isadore, but in the end after a series of non-committal answers denied to the interviewer that he was of Jewish descent. According to his second wife, he had at times considered evading a possible jail sentence in Germany by declaring himself to be a Jew in order to exercise the "right of return" under Israeli law and seek asylum there.
His father, Fritz, a lumberjack, was drafted into the German Army shortly after Ernst's birth and served as a medic on the Eastern Front. His father was captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war and did not return home until 1947, by which time he had become an alcoholic. Ernst was the fourth in a family of six children consisting of a brother, who later became a lawyer in the United States, and four sisters.
He studied graphic art at trade school, graduating in 1957 and emigrated to Canada in 1958, when he was 19, to avoid conscription by the German military. In 1960, he married French-Canadian Janick Larouche, whom he had met in 1959 in a language class in Toronto, and with whom he had sons Pierre and Hans. The couple moved to Montreal in 1961, where Zündel would eventually come under the tutelage of Canadian fascist politician Adrien Arcand.
Career Professionally, Zündel worked as a graphic artist, photographer, photo retoucher, and printer. He got his first job in the art department at Simpson-Sears in Toronto before opening his own art studio in Montreal. In 1969, he moved back to Toronto, where he founded Great Ideas Advertising, a commercial art studio.
On several occasions in the 1960s he was commissioned to illustrate covers for Maclean's magazine. His controversial views were not well known in the 1960s and 1970s, since he published his opinions under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich. At the time, he was also an organizer among immigrants for the Ralliement des créditistes, Quebec's Social Credit party. In 1968, he joined the Liberal Party of Canada and ran in that year's Liberal leadership convention under the anglicized name Ernest ZundelThe Zundel Affair , Shofar FTP Archives, nizkor.net as a self-described "nuisance candidate", running on an "immigrant rights" platform. He used his candidacy to campaign against anti-German attitudes. He dropped out of the contest prior to the election, but not before delivering his campaign speech to the convention.
In 1978 Zündel founded Concerned Parents of German Descent, a group that claimed German-Canadians and their children were the target of discrimination due to anti-German stereotyping in the media. In that year, Zündel, as the group's spokesman and its self-proclaimed "führer", issued press releases protesting the NBC Holocaust miniseries for its depiction of Germans, describing the show as "Zionist propaganda". In the late 1970s, reporter Mark Bonokoski unmasked Zündel, revealing that he was publishing neo-Nazi and antisemitic pamphlets such as The Hitler We Loved and Why under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.Bonokoski, Mark. "Zundel released from German Jail", Toronto Sun, March 2, 2010.
Holocaust denial
His publishing company, Samisdat Publishers, disseminated neo-Nazi literature, including Zündel's The Hitler We Loved and Why, Richard Verrall's Did Six Million Really Die?, and works by Malcolm Ross.
By the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers 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 what he claimed were Allied and Israeli war crimes. In 1981, he claimed that he was distributing literature in 14 languages to 45 different countries. He also claimed that he had a mailing list of 29,000 in the United States alone. Advertisement space for Samisdat Publishers was purchased in well-known reputable American magazines and even comic books. West Germany became another large market, in violation of West German Volksverhetzung (incitement of the masses) laws preventing Holocaust denial and dissemination of Nazi and neo-Nazi material, with Samisdat 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 content, including books, periodicals, symbols, decorations, films, cassettes, and records" had been intercepted entering West Germany; these shipments "came overwhelmingly from Canada." On 23 April 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. Under his pseudonym Christof Friedrich, he wrote a preface to Savitri Devi's esoteric neo-Nazi book The Lightning and the Sun. Under the same pseudonym, he also wrote various articles for George P. Dietz's neo-Nazi magazine Liberty Bell, and was a contributor and on the editorial staff of Dietz's other periodical, the White Power Report.
Trials in the 1980s
In 1983, Sabina Citron, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, filed a private complaint against Zündel before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In December of 1983, she filed a private criminal prosecution against Zundel for the crime of spreading false news, as set out in section 181 of Canada's Criminal Code. In 1984, the Ontario government joined the criminal proceedings against Zündel based on Citron's complaint.
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". After a much publicized trial in 1985, Zündel was found guilty. One of the prosecution witnesses, Auschwitz survivor Arnold Friedman, a Holocaust educator in Toronto, testified that "prisoners marched off to the ovens never returned" to which Zündel's lawyer, Doug Christie, responded by asking "if those who disappeared might not have been led out a nearby gate".The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, January 15, 1985
His conviction was later overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading to a second trial in 1988, in which he was again convicted, by a second jury.
The defence at the 1988 trial relied on testimony from Holocaust deniers David Irving and Fred A. Leuchter, a self-taught execution technician. Leuchter's testimony as an expert witness was accepted by the court on a very limited range of issues, and his accompanying Leuchter report was excluded, based on his lack of engineering credentials. He was allowed to testify only about what he saw on his trip to Auschwitz, and to compare what he saw with the execution technology that he worked with, but was ruled to have no qualifications to testify about toxicology or the construction of crematoria. In 1985, key expert testimony against Zündel's Holocaust denial was provided at great lengths by Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who refused to testify at Zündel's 1988 trial. Zündel was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court. However his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada which held in 1992 that section 181 (formerly known as section 177) was a violation of the guarantee of freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Other activities In 1994, Zündel campaigned in Canada to ban the movie Schindler's List as "hate speech""Schindler's List Exposed as Lies and Hate" , 1994 leaflet published by Zündel's Samisdat Publishers and celebrated the movie being banned in Malaysia and effectively banned in Lebanon and Jordan.Censorship offer file , Shofar FTP Archive, The Nizkor Project