Early Work

According to an autobiographical work, Ernst Zundel immigrated to Canada in 1958, at the age of 19, to escape the draft in West Germany. A self-described "Christian and pacifist," he settled in Montreal and supported himself as a commercial artist, photographer and photo retoucher.1 In 1978, however, a Canadian Broadcasting Company journalist revealed that using his middle names, Christof Friedrich, Zundel had become Canada's leading pro-Nazi and Holocaust-denial propagandist. Once exposed, Zundel continued his efforts under his conventional name.

The principal outlet for Zundel's early activities was his Toronto-based company, Samisdat Publishers, Ltd., which produced Zundel originals (like The Hitler We Loved and Why) and Holocaust-denial classics (including The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Arthur Butz; A Straight Look at the Third Reich and The Six Million Swindle, by Austin App; and Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald: The Greatest Fraud in History, by Richard Harwood).2 In addition, Zundel created two essentially one-man operations: the German-Jewish Historical Commission, which promoted Holocaust denial, and Concerned Parents of German Descent, which disseminated anti-Zionist propaganda to ethnic Germans. Zundel also contributed articles to the now-defunct West Virginia-based neo-Nazi magazine, Liberty Bell, published by George Dietz, and was listed on the editorial staff of White Power Report, another Dietz publication.

Zundel's early writings are a mix of neo-Nazi and white supremacist rhetoric, condemnations of Jews and Zionism, charges that Western media and governments bash Germany and Germans and Holocaust-denial and conspiracy theory. He was fixated on U.F.O.'s, believing them to be Nazi secret weapons based somewhere in Antarctica. He also promoted a new edition of Henry Ford's The International Jew in Liberty Bell.3 An article in the January 1977 issue of White Power Report entitled "Our New Emblem: The Best of Two Worlds" (referring to a design that merged a swastika and the American flag) conveys the tone of Zundel's work during this time:

Wherever we look, we White people find ourselves besieged by peoples of other races who compete aggressively against us for jobs, food, housing, education and above all -- power! The Jews are particularly adept at seizing or insinuating themselves into strategic positions in our society where they wield power far beyond the extent of their numbers....Through us, the White majority of Europe and America, the Jewish minority have obtained their advantages, including their Israel, their Federal Reserve, their World Bank and their International Monetary Fund. In exchange for these advantages, the Jews give us -- their White hosts -- wars, depressions, inflation, unemployment, energy shortages, higher and higher taxes and air piracy. Like sheep, they expect us to go down the road with them -- all the way to the kosher slaughterhouse. We White people of America have done nothing so far which would frustrate the Jews' expectations or their ambitions of becoming the world's slavemasters.

Zundel also proselytized among minority European ethnic groups in Canada; in a 1981 flier to "Fellow Canadians of the Ethnic Press," he warned:

You may remember that I had predicted that your own ethnic group and some of your leading citizens would next be the targets of defamation, vilification and distortion and that some of you might be transported to the Soviet Union and/or Israel for torture, trial and execution because the Zionists are striving to equate anti-Communism with Fascism in the public mind. Despite the hateful depiction of Poles and Ukrainians in the Holocaust hate film,⁴ you did not heed my warning. And now, the Zionist hate campaign is directed at you! ....

A wedge of lies, half-truths and anti-German propaganda has been driven between us by the Zionist-Communist commissars of disinformation. This propaganda wedge was purposely designed to keep anti-Communist peoples divided one against each other. We must smash this wedge of hate and come together.

Along these lines, Zundel also sent a flier to "Jewish leaders in North America, clergymen, politicians and media representatives" that warned (using the header "Act now -- prevent pogroms later"):

Should the present media-born hate campaign continue or be allowed to go unanswered, I see trouble ahead -- not from responsible people like myself, but from simple working people who express themselves by actions, not words, simply because they see no other recourse. Please believe me when I say that there is a growing and powerful current of German anger and frustration. I appeal to you to heed these danger signals and to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.... Act now. Avoid more pain, suffering and disunity. We do not need any pogroms on this continent -- neither against Jews nor Germans.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the catalog of Samisdat Publications grew from a few texts about Holocaust denial to a vast offering of Nazi and neo-Nazi memorabilia. It included some 50 posters featuring "Nazi Secret Weapons" ("military artists' depictions of actual German Secret Weapons are taken directly from the original blueprints, enlivened by showing them in combat action situations") including one-man jet-packs, "aerial mines" and flying saucers. It also contained an audiotape section of "Historic Speeches, Marches and Battle Songs," featuring "Music of the Third Reich" ("inspiring and nourishing food for the Aryan soul"), "Wehrmacht Victory Fanfare," "Adolf Hitler Speaks," "The Reichstag Declaration of War" and two-dozen more, along with numerous pamphlets and books devoted to Holocaust denial and the enumeration of Allied and Zionist "war crimes."

Through the sale of these materials and the solicitation of donations, Zundel was able to distribute his Holocaust-denial and pro-Nazi materials throughout the world, with particular emphasis on Canada, the United States and West Germany. In the United States, he claimed, his mailing list of media outlets, politicians and educators reached 29,000; he placed full-page advertisements for Samisdat Publications in several mass-circulation magazines and was even able, for a time, to buy advertising space in Marvel Comics. He cultivated an especially sympathetic clientele for his mail order business in West Germany and sent mailings to the entire West German parliament.

The dissemination of Nazi and neo-Nazi materials was illegal in West Germany (as it is today in the unified German state), and Zundel's efforts attracted the attention of the authorities. In December 1980, a representative of the West German Federal Ministry of Finance announced in the Bundestag that between January 1978 and December 1979, some "200 hundred shipments of right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi content [including] books, periodicals, symbols, decorations, films, cassettes, [and] records" were intercepted as they entered Germany. These shipments, the official reported, "came overwhelmingly from Canada." In an April 23, 1981, letter to the Canadian Jewish Congress, Bonn confirmed that the Canadian source was Samisdat Publishers.

As Zundel's notoriety grew, he also came to the attention of Canadian officials, who launched several criminal investigations against him. In November 1981, postal authorities suspended Samisdat's mailing privileges; the government argued that Zundel's anti-Jewish campaign violated criminal prohibitions against using the mails to incite hatred. While waiting for a review board to hear his appeal, he distributed his materials through a post office box in Niagara Falls, New York. In January 1983, Canada lifted its ban on his mailing privileges and his activities resumed there.

The next installment of his legal struggles began in 1985, when Zundel was charged under Section 177 of the Criminal Code of Canada for "knowingly publishing false news." The centerpiece of the trial, which began in January, was two Zundel mailings: a four-page letter entitled "The West, War, and Islam" and a thirty-page pamphlet entitled "Did Six Million Really Die?" While Zundel only added a foreword and conclusion to the latter, he composed "The West, War, and Islam" himself and mailed it to several hundred public figures in the Middle East. The letter warns Muslims that their enemies -- "international Zionists" particularly -- were "goad[ing] the West into a future criminal war" against them. Zundel asked for financial support so that he could lead the fight against the Zionist misinformation campaigns and dispel the myth of the "so-called Holocaust," from which, he claimed, Zionists gain so much of their power.

Among those testifying for the prosecution at the trial were Holocaust survivors, a history professor and even a banker -- since Zundel had claimed that an international conspiracy existed among Freemasons, Communists, international financiers, and Zionists. Speaking for the defense were such leading Holocaust deniers as Sweden's Ditlieb Felderer, France's Robert Faurisson and Canada's James Keegstra, all of whom have been convicted in their own countries under hate crimes laws for their Holocaust-denial activities. In this case as in his subsequent trials, Zundel's lawyer was Douglas Christie, who has represented several leading far-right extremists in Canada.5

In the Canadian press, opinions were divided on the wisdom of prosecuting Zundel. Some Jewish organizations lobbied strongly for his prosecution; Sabina Citron, of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, went so far as to file charges privately against Zundel under Canada's criminal code. Others, however, both in the Jewish and non-Jewish communities, suggested that a trial would only provide Zundel with an opportunity to publicize his views.

Legal scholars also questioned the decision to prosecute Zundel under the so-called "false news" charge. To win, prosecutors had the distasteful task of "proving" that the Holocaust had occurred and the difficult task of proving that Zundel had knowingly lied when he wrote that it had not. Section 281 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the promotion of hatred against any "identifiable group," seemed a more appropriate charge, but the statute was notoriously difficult to prosecute. Other criticisms were raised during the trial: for example, the prosecutor could have asked the judge to take "judicial notice" of the fact of the Holocaust; had the judge agreed to do so, the jurors would have been instructed simply to accept the historical fact of the Holocaust. In fact, the government did request judicial notice of the Holocaust, but only after it had called survivors and academics to the witness stand. The judge subsequently refused the request, stating that once the Holocaust had been made the subject of testimony the defense deserved the opportunity to respond.

Nonetheless, Zundel was convicted on February 26, 1985, of publishing false news about the Holocaust. He was sentenced to fifteen months in jail, and three years probation, during which he was prohibited from publishing on the subject. The fear that the trial would help Zundel publicize his cause was apparently merited. Making effective use of TV cameras, he arrived at the courthouse each day in a conspicuous bulletproof vest and a blue hard hat bearing the inscription "Freedom of Speech," and was usually accompanied by a retinue of supporters wearing yellow hard hats. He appeared for sentencing in black-face (indicating that white men could not receive justice in Canada), and carrying a cross, also inscribed with a "Freedom of Speech" motto. At an impromptu press conference afterward he announced, "[The seven-week trial] cost me $40,000 in lost work -- but I got $1 million worth of publicity for my cause. It was well worth it."

Zundel did not serve his sentence. In January 1987, the Ontario Court of Appeals overturned the 1985 conviction, citing procedural errors during the trial. In June 1987, a new trial was granted.

This second trial was responsible for introducing one of the most influential Holocaust-denial publications. In an attempt to support his fraudulent claims, Zundel hired Fred Leuchter -- an unlicensed, self-taught "engineer" from Massachusetts who designed capital punishment equipment -- to conduct unauthorized experiments at the Auschwitz death camp memorial. (After Leuchter's Holocaust-denial materials were published, public outcry prompted the licensing board of engineers in Massachusetts to investigate his credentials; an ensuing lawsuit for practicing without a license was settled when Leuchter agreed to cease representing himself as an engineer). Leuchter's "investigation" -- he sneaked into the gas chamber at Auschwitz and chipped samples off the walls -- unsurprisingly concluded that no gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, Birkenau or Majdanek. The Leuchter Report was published by Samisdat, and has since earned the status of gospel among Holocaust-denial activists. 7

In addition to Leuchter's "expert" testimony, which the court dismissed, citing his lack of credentials, Zundel's defense witnesses again included Holocaust deniers such as Mark Weber, Bradley Smith, Ditlieb Felderer and Robert Faurisson. Also testifying for Zundel was David Irving, a right-wing British historian of World War II who had promulgated the controversial thesis that Hitler had not known about or ordered the destruction of European Jewry. Irving used the occasion to publicize his "conversion" to unequivocal denial of the Holocaust. Notwithstanding the sympathetic testimony of these men, on November 13, 1988, Zundel was convicted and sentenced to a nine-month jail term. On this occasion, the judge had taken judicial notice of the Holocaust at the start of the trial.

When an appeals court upheld the conviction, Zundel reported to Toronto's Don Jail on February 5, 1990, wearing a striped "concentration camp" costume labeled "Political Prisoner Ernst Zundel." After spending a week in jail, he was released on $10,000 bail pending an appeal to Canada's Supreme Court. Zundel described his captivity to the anti-Semitic magazine The Spotlight saying, "I was held in solitary confinement with no windows, a light burning around the clock and a peephole....Sort of how Rudolf Hess was treated."

Two months later, writing in the March 1990 issue of Liberty Bell, Zundel blamed his conviction on "anti-Nazi bias" and the "preconceived notions" about World War II held by prosecutors, lawyers, court officials and the media. The Ontario Court of Appeals, however, ruled that the judge who rendered the 1988 verdict had acted properly in accepting the basic facts of the Holocaust as not open to debate by reasonable people. Nonetheless, on August 27, 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down as unconstitutional the law banning the spread of false news. This decision apparently put an end to the deportation proceedings launched against Zundel after his 1988 conviction.

In 1994 Zundel applied to the Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Department for citizenship. He had applied once before, in 1966, but was rejected; according to the Toronto Sun (June 27, 1994), no reason was offered. An anonymous government official was quoted in the same article as saying that although the second application was "flawless," the Canadian government was nevertheless going to "try very hard to deny" Zundel's bid for citizenship.

Under Canadian law, citizenship may be denied to individuals engaged in organized crime, or to those charged with or appealing summary convictions or indictable offences. Zundel's previous legal problems did not fall into any of these categories.8 Citizenship could also be denied to those deemed a threat to Canadian security. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the government body responsible for evaluating applicants who may fall into this category, ruled that Zundel met this criterion because of his links to far-right extremist groups. Zundel tried to suppress the findings of the CSIS; he argued before a Canadian federal court in June 1996 that the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which reviews the CSIS's findings, should be disqualified from ruling on his case because it was demonstrably biased against him (having investigated him previously).

Two months later, in early August 1996, federal court judge Darrel Heald ruled in Zundel's favor, but acknowledged that his ruling undermined the intent of Canada's citizenship statutes and invited legislators to amend the law to make it easier to prevent Zundel from becoming a citizen. Such emendation proved unnecessary, however, because an appeals court reversed Judge Heald's ruling in December 1997. Zundel pursued the matter of CSIS bias to the Canadian Supreme Court, which ruled against him in May 1998. Zundel then attempted increasingly arcane legal maneuvers to prevent the government's findings from being implemented, but his efforts ended in December 2000, when the Supreme Court refused to hear any further appeals. In February 2001, Zundel left Canada for the United States. He currently resides in Tennessee.

In August 1996, the Canadian Human Rights Commission (a government body responsible for enforcing the country's 1977 Human Rights Act), opened yet another chapter in Zundel's saga with the law. At issue was an Internet site that bore Zundel's name -- the so-called "Zundelsite" -- which, since mid-1995, had served as an electronic library of Holocaust-denial texts and which, in the opinion of Zundel's critics,9 incited hatred against Jews. As part of the Human Rights Act, using "telephonic devices" to incite hatred was outlawed, and the CHRC had successfully prosecuted cases involving telephones and telephone answering machines. This was the first time that the Commission targeted an Internet site, and Christie, Zundel's long-time lawyer, argued that the Internet was not "telephonic" and did not fall under the CHRC's purview. In May 1997, a federal adjudicator disagreed. During the next four years, a CHRC tribunal held a lengthy 52 days of hearings on the Zundelsite case, and heard from about 20 witnesses. Because of the broad range of issues -- including free speech, the definition of hate speech and the regulation of the Internet -- many groups followed the trial with interest. Free-speech groups, such as Electronic Frontier Canada, voiced their opposition to the prosecution of the case, though they usually added that they disagreed with Zundel's views about the Holocaust.

Illustration on the Zundelsite

One of the hearings' central issues was the degree of control, if any, Zundel exercised over the content of the site, which was run by a Ukrainian-born, Paraguay-bred German Mennonite named Ingrid Rimland. At the time, Rimland lived in Carlsbad, California, and used a United States-based Internet service provider. Zundel and Rimland both claimed that Zundel had no role in the site's operation. Rimland affirmed in an affidavit, "I am the creator, designer, editor and primary electronic columnist of the Zundelsite." She asserted that "I decided on the name --'Zundelsite' -- because Mr. Zundel is the world's best-known skeptic of genocidal activities alleged to have happened in German concentration camps.... I do not recall consulting Mr. Zundel if I could use the word 'Zundelsite.' I unilaterally decided that I would."

Lawyers for the prosecution, however, argued that Zundel played an active role in running the site and supplying material. In a November 1995 letter to supporters, Zundel had called Rimland "my Webmaster," and in February 1996 referred to himself as the Zundelsite's "founder." Rimland herself wrote in March 1996 that Zundel had "impacted the world in massive, major ways with nothing but an ordinary computer." Pressing the point, the prosecution brought Zundel's estranged wife, Irene, to testify that he paid Rimland $3,000 per month, which included money for the maintenance of the Web site, and that he was in constant communication with her by fax. Zundel "got out of bed in the morning and went straight to the fax machine," she testified. She explained that he would write English and German versions of Holocaust-denial documents, which he would fax to Rimland, who would type and proofread them, then post them on the Web.

Final arguments in the case were not heard until February 2001. A final decision has yet to be handed down.

Zundel's relocation to the United States has been noted on the Zundelsite but does not seemed to have affected its operation. Calling itself the "most besieged" Web site, it recently combined its resources into a network that includes the Web pages of Bradley Smith, the Institute for Historical Review, Frederick Toben's Adelaide Institute in Australia, and the Belgian VHO (Vrij Historisch Onderzoek). It continues to churn out its signature "Zgrams"; ostensibly written by Rimland, these daily messages typically survey current events and Holocaust-related themes from a conspiratorial, anti-Jewish perspective. And while Zundel has maintained a low profile in the United States, his reputation, flamboyance and online presence have helped him remain a popular and influential propagandist in what he calls "the struggle for Truth in History" -- denial of the Holocaust and other so-called Jewish conspiracies.

¹"Zundel-Haus" ­ Ernst Zundel: His Struggle, His Life. Posted on www.zundelsite.org. No author is listed for this 60-page document; however, its revelations suggest that it was either written by Zundel himself or by a follower (probably Rimland) in close consultation with him.

²Richard Harwood is the pseudonym of Richard Verral, the former editor of Spearhead, the magazine of the English neo-Nazi National Front.

³Liberty Bell, June 1976 and January 1977.

⁴Probably a reference to the 1978 NBC mini-series "Holocaust."

⁵Christie has attended Holocaust denial conferences and founded the Western Canada Concept Party, which advocates the secession of western Canada for the purposes of creating an ethnically homogenous state founded on Christian culture and European heritage. He has made bigoted remarks about recent immigrants but is more discreet than his extremist clients; he has not publicly endorsed denial of the Holocaust.

⁶The New York Times reported on May 26, 1983: "A 20-year-old waitress remembered Mr. Keegstra as a teacher. 'You didn't agree with him, you didn't pass,' she said." According to the Montreal Gazette (June 25, 1992): "Students were rewarded with better marks if they repeated Keegstra's lectures verbatim. A student who quoted the World Book Encyclopedia in contradiction to Keegstra got a failing mark on an essay, [prosecutor Steven] Koval said."

⁷In Errol Morris's documentary about Leuchter, Mr. Death, the chemist who tested the samples (not knowing at the time what they were) said, "I don't think the results of The Leuchter Report have any validity."

⁸Unrelatedly, he had been convicted several times by West German courts for violations of that country's laws against the dissemination of hate literature.

⁹Notably the Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations and Sabina Citron of the Holocaust Remembrance Association.

Next: Ingrid Rimland