Ernst Zundel, Douglas Christie, and the Conspiracy of Holocaust Denial in Canada

Hoffman admits that one problem impeding Jewish acceptance or cooperation with the thrust of this `sensitive and decent open letter' mayhave been Zundel's habit of enclosing Nazi items in his mailings:

"One obstacle was the fact that Zundel's mass mailings also consisted of National Socialist regalia, Hitler speeches and other documents from that era composed of in-context statements by the principles themselves. As a result, Zundel was regarded in some quarters as a clever neo-Nazi front man, using a facade of human rights concerns to secretly advance a Nazi world takeover." [19]

By the year 1981, Samisdat had its ability to send and receive mail curtailed by order of Canada's postal minister. Both Lenski and Hoffman suggest, without providing substantiation to back up the charge, that this action was as a result of pressure brought to bear on this man by a woman named Sabina Citron. Here is how Hoffman tells this part of the Zundel story:

"In Novemeber of 1981, at the insistence of Toronto's stand-in for Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, busybody Sabina Citron managed to coerce the Minister of Canada's Post, Andre Oulet [sic] , into banning Samisdat Publishing Ltd. from sending or recieving any mail whatsoever. Commisar Citron had now transformed Zundel's operation into a real underground `Samisdat' in every sense of the word." [20]

It should be noted at this point in our narrative that a Simon Wiesenthal Center Report, published in Toronto in 1994, recognized that by at least as early as 1980, Ernst Zundel "had become a major writer and distributor of pro-Nazi and Holocaust denial materials, boasting that he regularly mailed large packs of fliers and booklets to Germany, Australia, the United States and England." The authors of Holocaust Denial: Bigotry in the Guise of Scholarship, Dr. Frances Henry of York University, and Carol Tator of Equal Opportunity Consultants, further seem to concur with Hoffman and Lenski that it was indeed Citron who had been responsible for convincing Ouellet to revoke what they called Zundel's `mailing privileges':

"In 1981, Sabina Citron, head of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, petitioned to have his mailing privileges revoked. As evidence she pointed to two booklets by Zundel's Samisdat Press: The West, War and Islam and Did Six Really Die? Zundel's chief defense was that he had been steadily monitored by the police and never charged under Canada's anti-hate law with `promoting hatred against an identifiable group.' On this basis, a postal tribune restored his mailing privileges." [21]

Zundel had appealed the postal ban with the support of the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, and won back his right to mail, which apparentlyunder Canadian law could be revoked only had he been convicted of a previous crime, which he had not. Hoffman had not been able to resist drawing parallels between this `torment' and that suffered by underground publishers in the Soviet Union. The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) was `appalled,' according to Hoffman, and Zundel himself couldn't refrain from gloating that the governments of Canada and West Germany had both found him not guilty:

"Zundel pointed out that now two Western governments, `on two continents, utilizing their full powers of investigation and prosecution, found me absolutely innocent of all Zionist accusations that I have been ditributing hate literature.'" [22]

The Wiesenthal Center Report of 1994 emphasizes Citron's disappointment, but also her determination to have Zundel's hate- mongering activities stopped, this time by legal means through the courts:

"Deeply disappointed by the postal tribune's decision, Sabina Citron sought to have him charged under the provisions of the Criminal Code's anti-hate literature laws. However, the law requires the consent of the Attorney General before charges can be laid and Ontario's chief law officer - although no friend of Zundel's - was reluctant. His staff pointed out that the law had seldom been used so there was no predicting how a jury might react. If found `not guilty,' Zundel would undoubtedly claim a great victory." [23]

Next year, Zundel expanded his video production work in conjunction with someone Hoffman describes as a "Jewish anti-Zionist dissident," one Ditlieb Felderer. [24] Hoffman describes Felderer's 27 forensic investigations of Auschwitz as activity which "made him the world authority on the faked exhibits there." [25] A video called "Genocide by Propaganda" feaured Felderer's investigations. Another Zundel-produced video focused on the `rigged war crimes issue,' with an accused Nazi war criminal named Frank Walus being exonerated after having been falsely or erroneously accused by 11 Israeli eyewitneses.

STEVE PEABODY, SABINA CITRON & THE `FALSE NEWS' TRIAL

The next twist in this tale leads us up to the man who apparently suggested to Canadian authoriities a possible legal manoeuvre which might very well have stopped Zundel in his tracks. Hoffman identifies this person as Steve Peabody, `a Canadian Broadcasting Company [sic] (CBC) reporter." [26] Peabody had read a book in Zundel's catalogue called Did Six Million Really Die? By `Richard Harwood.' According to Hoffman,Peabody approached Citron when he found out about errors in Harwood's text. There is, of course, no way to prove that this conversation ever happened, but it works neatly for the further demonization of Citron (from Hoffman's point of view):

"Tipped off to the existence of a half dozen errors in the text (a good showing compared to the dozens of errors in Hilberg's 1967 The Destruction of European Jewry), Peabody approached Citron with an idea: bring charges against Zundel under Canada's obscure `blue law,' the ancient `False News' section of the Criminal Code." [27]

Lenski is not as defensive as Hoffman with respect to the errors in the book. In fact, he is not prepared to defend them at all, but neither does he mention that they were not, in fact, the work of anyone named `Harwood.' He does takes note of the specific section of the Code under which Peabody hoped to find Zundel guilty, and mentions the date that Citron filed the complaint:

"As noted in the Introduction, this early work of Holocaust revisionism, first published in Britain in 1974, is marred by a significant number of errors, most of them minor, which no contemporary Holocaust revisionist would defend...In November of 1983, Citron filed a private complaint against Zundel under Section 177 of the Canadian Criminal Code." [28]

The Canadian authors of Holocaust Denial tend to lessen the sole responsiblity for the initiation of the prosecution against Zundel, mentioning the fact that lawyers recommended the tactic to Citron, and also take care to note that `Harwood' was in fact a pen name for a notorious English fascist:

"As an alternative, Citron's lawyers recommended she launch a private prosecution under the little known and rarely used `False News Act.' Listed as Section 177 of the Criminal Code, the law forbids the spreading of false new injurious to the public interest. As evidence, Citron again pointed to The West, War and Islam and Did Six Million Really Die? The first claimed that Zionist bankers, communists, and Freemasons were actively conspiring to control the world. The second, purportedly written by a Richard Harwood, `a writer and specialist in political and diplomatic aspects of the Second World War,' was in fact written by Richard Verral, a member of Britain's openly fascist National Front." [29]

Zundel's first hearing took place on December 28, 1983, by which time the Attorney General of the Province of Ontario ordered that the case be broadened from that of a private individual to that of one prosecuted by the Crown, according to Henry and Tator, because the latter was "uneasywith the private prosecution of a case that might have historical significance." [30] But it was not to be until June of the following year that the "main preliminary hearing took place," according to Lenski. At that hearing, we learn from the account in Lenski's Chapter entitled `Inquisition in Toronto,' that "the defense team's biggest gun was Professor Robert Faurisson, the leader of French revisionism." Faurison was opposed by Professor Raul Hilberg, described by Lenski as "a political scientist and author of the 1,274-page The Destruction of the European Jews." Lenski cites Hoffman to the effect that "revisionist scholars from nearly a dozen countries [had] ...transformed Zundel's `warren-like' Victorian home into `a tiny university of forbidden thoughts and suppressed information.'" [31]

Tator and Henry outline the Crown Prosecutor's arguments very succinctly. According to them, that person focused on the book Did Six Million Really Die?, which allegedly was full of falsehoods. The difficulty was to try to prove that Zundel, as `an extremely well-read student of World War II history,' knew that the book was full of falsehoods, but, notwithstanding that knowledge, published it anyway:

"Among them was the claim that less than 300,000 Jews died in Nazi custody; that extermination of the Jews had never been part of official Nazi policy; and that the Holocaust is a hoax or fraud invented by Jews after World War II to enable Israel to collect huge reparation payments from Germany. The Crown pointed to numerous falsehoods, misquotations, and deliberately misrepresented statistics in the booklet.

"It was the Crown's position that Zundel, as an extremely well-read student of World War II history, knew the pamphlet was false when he published it. Zundel's purpose, the Crown asserted, was to rehabilitate Hitler's reputation, restore belief in National Socialism and promote animosity towards Jews." [32]

MY OWN PERSONAL ACQUAINTANCE WITH DOUGALS CHRISTIE AND

ERNST ZUNDEL'S FATEFUL MEETING WITH THE MAVERICK LAWYER FROM VICTORIA

That summer Zundel was to travel to the Canadian West to meet Douglas H. Christie, a lawyer from Victoria, on Vancouver Island, who had attracted national attention defending an Alberta schoolteacher named James Keegstra who had `taught' the history of the Holocaust from the point of view of the deniers. The meeting was to change the lives of both men irrevocably, and was to initiate Christie into the world-wide conspiracy of hate that is known euphemistically by its perpetrators as`Revisionism.'

As a young man, I had heard of the good work that Mr. Christie had done at St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Cathedral in Victoria for Vietnamese refugees. He had been one of the founding members of the St. Andrew's Refugee Association, the local Catholic relief organization whose charitable ministry brought succor and aid to refugees fleeing oppression from various countries, and which is still operative today. I had even shared a beer or two with him in the Beaver Pub of the Empress Hotel, eager to find out more about his fledgling Western Canada Concept (WCC), a new Western Canadian separatist party which he had also founded around the same time.

At that time I found Christie to be a very intense, and, I would even dare say, driven, individual with opinions about the future of the West which had obviously been developed over some length of time. He had a kind of sarcastic sense of humour which I found attractive, and I was particularly intrigued to hear his version of how the great francophone- Catholic-Metis leader Louis Riel had been hounded and murdered by Anglo- Canadian forces sent out to Manitoba to quell the Red River Rebellion in the late nineteenth century. At the time Manitoba was not yet a Canadian province and its goverance was, for all practical purposes, under Riel's control.

Christie's unusual analysis seems to have been, if my memory serves me well, that Riel was an early Western Canadian separatist of enormous stature, and that it was a complete travesty for the federal Liberal government in Ottawa to have put his image on a Canadian postage stamp in the early seventies as a sop to the francophone Quebec separatists. The irony here seems to be that the Liberals were engaged in their own type of `revisionism' with respect to the memory of Riel! I heard nothing in these pub conversations that would indicate the apparent later fatal attraction he was to undergo toward the type of neo-Nazi politics that Zundel represented. Christie's politics at the time simply seemed to be an extreme variant of the type of anti-federalist regionalism which is very common in all parts of Canada, but is not necessarily or essentially racist.

It came as a surprise and a personal disappointment, therefore, to read that Christie was now defending not just the `rights' of Keegstra and Zundel, but also their very ideas. I was confused, and discussed the matter with my father. That confused me even more, as he was an old fascist of the first stripe, and tended to see Zundel in his own estimation, as a persecuted and misunderstood person. He also began to openly profess an admiration for Christie as a courageous and highly intelligent person who was posing some very legitimate questions about the limits of what he called `the myth of free speech in this phony so-called democracy.' As the Zundel trials dragged on, Christie's performance in them, as reported in the local Times-Colonist newspaper, began to figure more often in our heated discussions around the dinner table.

According to Bradley Smith, a `revisionist' speaker whose adulatory banquet dinner speech in praise of Christie was recorded on a cassette tape recently purchased for the University of San Francisco History Department from the IHR entitled "1986 Seventh Revisionist Conference," Christie was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba "forty years ago," which would now make him about 51 years old. On that tape, Smith goes on to inform his audience that "Mr. Christie has taken all varieties of criminal cases, he's a practicing Catholic..." He then goes on to erroneously claim that Christie's WCC "took 12% of the vote in the first provincial elections in Canada." Ironically, Christie has a motto, and it is: "`Say what you like; the truth stands." Finally, after a long and somewhat pedantic panegyric on the supposed sanctity of `the great universal ideal of free speech' to which he attributes the invention and institutionalisation to `a highly civilized people...English-speaking Anglo-Saxons," he introduces Christie as "the defender of Ernst Zundel, the defender of James Keegstra, the defender of the wonderful light of reason everywhere." [33]

In his acceptance speech for receiving an award from the IHR, Christie reminded the audience that he had told the Zundel jury that "unless mankind is free to speak, the choice is between silence and violence, and I am not one who believes in violence, and therefor I must oppose the infliction of silence upon those whose views are as they believe them to be right, and who will speak them, with or without the sanction of the law of a corrupt state." [34]

THE 1985 `FALSE NEWS' TRIAL OF ERNST ZUNDEL, `SAMISDAT' PUBLISHER

Zundel managed to find, according to Lenski, 22 witnesses to testify on his behalf during the 1985 trial. Among those were some of the most prominent of the deniers in the world, who would also perform the service for Zundel at his second trial three years later: "Several of the more important ones -- Dr. Russell Barton, Dr. Gary Botting, Thies Christophersen, Dietlieb Felderer and Udo Walendy, as well as Dr. Faurisson -- testified again at the 1988 Zundel trial." [35] For the record, it should be noted that Botting has subsequently dissociated himself fromthe deniers.

Christie, a tall man of very serious demeanor, had a sense of the dramatic, and was very conscious of his own importance in terms of the role he played in the so-called `Great Holocaust Trials.' He was prone to hyperbole, and tended to try to exaggerate on a number of occasions the historical importance of the trials themselves: " `There is more at stake here than has been at stake in any other trial, probably in Canada's history.'" Lenski also quoted his summation address to the jurors in the Toronto District Court Building on Armoury Street, scene of both Zundel trials: " `You 12 people have more power in your hands for good or evil than any other 12 people I've ever met...A clear answer from you ...will put an end to a process which, if it continues, will lead us to the destruction of all freedom in society.'" [36]

Ruminations about violence and `destruction of all freedom in society' were constant themes in Christie's thinking. The radical dichotomy between silence and violence mentioned in his 1986 IHR speech was already to be found in his 1985 Toronto address:

"`To everything in life there are two sides,' he said, `and many more quite often, and nobody, no matter how well informed or how expert, has all truth, or ever will.

" `If you can't have freedom to disagree, then there's either violence, or there is silence, neither of which is traditional in our country, neither of which is necessary in the future.

" `Violence is the end of the road for official truth.

" `There is a power in this land,' said Christie, `that doesn't want you to think about the Holocaust, doesn't want anybody out here to think about it,' and has determined that those asking the wrong questions `will be prosecuted and publicly humiliated.'" [37]

Bearing this radical dichotomy between violence and silence in mind, it is also very instructive to examine more of Christie's rhetoric in his summation address to appreciate the extent to which it tended to exaggerate the supposed sanctity of `free speech rights,' and also tended to dismiss the significance of the conscious promulgation of lies. For example, with respect to the errors in the `Harwood' book, he simply dismissed them as `unproven': " `Ninety percent of the quotations in the [Harwood] book are proven and accepted. Ten percent are unproven. That's all.'" [38]

Zundel himself sat "in the prisoner's dock during his first trial for printing the book Did Six Million Really Die? with a policeman seated next to him" according to a caption under an artist's rendition in Hoffman'sbook. [39] His behaviour in the courtroom was apparently often a matter of concern even for some of his own supporters, who thought that he stood a better chance of aquittal had he been more decorous and obsequious:

"His performance in the next several days is one of the most controversial portions of his trial. Many say he was far too candid and impractical. Still other observers point out that Ernst had one eye on the jury and exercised prudence and circumspection, but another on history and eternity, which impelled him to forego the kind of dissembling others urged on him.

"When he struck back in reply to Mr. Griffiths' extremely discourteous questions, he hit like a sledgehammer. He refused to repudiate his deceased mentor, spiritual godfather and political advisor, Adrien Arcand. Arcand had founded the National Unity Party.

" `He was a great Canadian,' Ernst told the court with total loyalty. Did this go badly for him with the jury? Who can say? But Zundel obviously did not believe that even the greatest of victories in a courtroom would be worth a price like betraying his old friend, who had himself suffered so much, including six years imprisonment for his independent writing and lectures." [40]

With respect to the publication of the book for which he was in court under the `False News' Section of the Code, Hoffman reports that Zundel held that it was not comparable in its fundamental flaws when compared with evidence produced by the Prosecutor's author-witnesses:

"Zundel testified on everything from the doctored content of the Anne Frank Diary to the essential accuracy of the book for which he was being tried, Did Six Million Really Die? (which he admitted contained a few honest errors, but was fundamentally not as flawed as the books authored by witnesses the Crown produced to try and convict him)." [41]

Despite Christie's efforts, and those of the other 22 witnesses called to testify in his defense, Zundel was found guilty. Lenski and Hoffman both blame instructions from the judge to the jury for having prejudiced or constrained them in a number of ways against the defendant, and his lawyer. As Lenski puts it:

"All this eloquence was futile because Judge Hugh Locke's charge to the jury was the last thing they heard before retiring, and he told them, in effect, to ignore most of what Christie had said. The Zundel trial had nothing to do with freedom of expression. Their verdict would have no bearing on the future course of Canadian society, but only on the fate of one man." [42]

Hoffman is harsher in his condemnation of Judge Locke. He says that the County Court Judge lied to the jury:

"Judge Hugh Locke also addressed the jury with his usual feigned reasonableness and patronizing. Casting all impartiality to the wind, he directly attacked one of Doug Christie's best points: that this was a landmark case which would indeed alter the entire fabric of Canadian society.

" `Canada will be the same no matter which way you rule,' Locke lied to the jury. He also at this time took unofficial `judicial notice' of the gas chamber extermination claim.

"Judicial notice is usually used in a court exclusively for establishing universally recognized verities over which any arguing would merely constitute absurd time-wasting. For example, judicial notice is taken of the fact that the sun rises in the east, and so forth." [43]

The jury's finding in the first of his trials did not sit well with Zundel, who was ordered by the judge to serve 15 months in prison. He tried appealing the first decision, and was brought back before the Ontario Court of Appeal, but was also found guilty there, and sentenced to nine months in jail. His effort to appeal the second verdict was denied by the same Court. Undeterred, he went to the highest Court in the land. There he won a kind of Pyrrhic victory:

"Zundel finally appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. In August of 1992, the Court reversed his conviction on the grounds that Section 177 of the Criminal Code -- spreading false news -- was too vague and too broadly drawn. The law, the Court feared, could be used to `stifle a whole range of speech, some of which has long been regarded as legitimate.' The Court made it clear that it did not condone Zundel's opinions or actions but based its opinion solely on the inappropriateness of the False News Act." [44]

COUNTERARGUMENTS, REFUTATIONS AND OTHER EVIDENCE AGAINST `ZUNDELISM'

A huge body of historical literature, which the deniers try to summarily dismiss as `Zionist propaganda,' has been amassed since the end of the Second World War documenting the horrors of the Holocaust. Any serious student of statistics who wants to bother tackling them with respect to the numbers is certainly able to do so without any difficulty whatsoever. It is not my intention in these concluding remarks to dignify one of their most basic assumptions (that the `six million dead' figure is inflated) with a detailed statistical response.

This game only serves the interests of these racists themselves,diverting attention from the real issue, which is the complete and utter denial of an insidious mindset of irrational hatred, a denial which attempts to diminish the significance of any human murder, but which is particularly callous with respect to the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. As Henry and Tator assert in Holocaust Denial :

"No knowledgeable estimate of the Jewish Holocaust dead has ever been less than 5 million. More recent estimates, using information recently available from Soviet archives, have gone as high as 7 million. To anyone with any sense, it is obvious that the exact number of dead is not the issue. The ruthless, pointless extermination of even one person is as reprehensible as the murder of 1 million or 6 million." [45]

Recently, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has caused quite a stir in Holocaust Studies and German History circles with the publication of his controversial new book entitiled Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen's thesis, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of `ordinary' Germans were directly responsible for, and complicit with the pervasive antisemitism that led up to the Holocaust, is an admitedly difficult read, even for those who may be philosophically disposed to agreeing with him. But if Goldhagen's worst stylistic fault is a tendancy to repetition and hyperbole, perhaps it is worth pondering why he would feel the need to restate his thesis ad nauseam. I suggest that the reason may be an unstated fear that the irrationalities and obfuscations of the racist agenda of the deniers may be gaining a creeping mainstream acceptance, and he is simply trying to do his best to counteract it.

Paranoid German hypernationalist racists such as Zundel will undoubtedly see Goldhagen's book as yet another in a long stream of `Zionist' media manipulations. That reaction is to be expected. While Goldhagen's thesis is unsparing in its denunciation of the inherent evil of antisemitism, I saw no evidence of Zionist anti-German racism in it. It is obviously a book written from the Jewish perspective, highly critical of a whole tradition in German culture which is indefensible (`eliminationist antisemitism as genocidal motivation'), but that is all that one can really say with any certainty with respect to its own `racial motivation.'

Goldhagen's book will be a blessing if it stimulates further discussion (for example, in the Roman Catholic Church) about complicity with the evils of Nazism or any other totalitarian system. It certainly already appears to have had beneficial consequences:

"Since the book's publication, a fairly broad consensus seems to have developed in Germany that the discussion which it launched is notonly necessary but also long overdue, and that, no matter what conclusions individuals may draw, it will produce only good. Many, even some who disagree with my conclusions, have said as much. Ultimately, this is why the book has resonated so positively in Germany and why much of the public has rebelled against those opinion leaders who tried to quash the discussion. People are sick of the myths and the alibis.

"The reception that this book has received tells us a great deal about what is positive in Germany today. For Germans to confront this horrific part of their past is unpleasant in the extreme. That so many are willing to do so is yet another indication of how radically transformed democratic Germany has become in the second half of the twentieth century." [46]

In her comprehensive overview of Holocaust History up to 1981, The Holocaust and the Historians, Lucy S. Dawidowicz credits the work of the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher (Die Deutsche Diktatur) with being "the first comprehensive history of the Third Reich and its origins...published in Germany." Bracher had written in his preface of a hope for democracy in Germany similar to that of Goldhagen quoted above: "This book is dedicated to the hope that a sober picture of the German dictatorship may help Germany avoid both old and new dangers, primarily the traditional authoritarian concept of the state, but also a radical utopianism -- both expressions of intolerance and conceit, and, moreover, profoundly unpolitical modes of behavior." [47]

Goldhagen's debt to Bracher is never acknowledged in his new book, but seems clear when we consider how the latter designed his 1969 history. According to Dawidowicz, Bracher recognized anti-Semitism as the key to an understanding of the Nazi period:

"Bracher is the first German historian, indeed, the first non-Jewish historian anywhere, who has recognizd that from the start the Nazis assigned primacy of place, in doctrine and in action, to make hatred of the Jews, with all its tragic consequences, a cardinal feature of the state's policy. He has placed anti-Semitism and the destruction of the Jews in the very center of his book, fully integrating that subject matter with the political and military developments of the time." [48]

Adolph Hitler's own writings against the Jews are well-documented in a book entitled Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. There we find an excerpt from his book Hitlers Zweites Buch -- Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928 (published in New York in 1961 under the English title Hitler's Secret Book ) where his thoughts with respect tothe Jewish people are quite clear:

"The bitterest struggle for the victory of Jewry at the present time is being waged in Germany. Here it is the National Socialist movement which alone has taken upon itself the struggle against this execrable crime against mankind..." [49]

Hitler's vilification of the Jews can also be found in Mein Kampf where he literally demonizes all of them in a regurgitaion of slanders and stereotypes that had been common in Germany for centuries:

"Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.

"The ignorance of the broad masses about the inner nature of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes, make the people an easy victim for this Jewish campaign of lies." [50]

Hitler advocated his so-called `German-National' movement as the only logical antidote to what he saw as the poisonous effects of the total Jewish take-over of the German state apparatus:

"...And the German-National movement may well be the only one to realize that the whole internal structure of our state is not Germanic, but rather Semitic, that all our actions, even our thinking, are today no longer German but Jewish." [51]

The infamous `Final Solution' was the consequence of such vicious racism. The mass extermination of the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples deemed undesirable for whatever reason had been put into effect as a result of millions of German people finding the above-quoted sentiments quite acceptable and normal.

An article by one Ray Moseley of the Chicago Tribune picked up by the San Francisco Examiner on Tuesday, May 20, 1997, presents new evidence to suggest that Britain's Public Records Office was well aware as early as September 12, 1941 of the execution of the Jews:

"Britain's Public Records Office -- the equivalent of the U. S. National Archives -- released the documents, including a British intelligence report of Sept. 12, 1941, stating that the execution of Jews was a regular feature of German police radio reports after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

"It said these reports provided evidence of `savage intimidation if not of ultimate extermination' of the Jews.

"Until now, historians have believed the policy of extermination was adopted by Nazi leaders at a meeting in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, in early 1942. But the latest reports suggest an unofficial policywas in effect earlier." [52]

It was not to be until late in the second half of 1944, however, that the Allies started to protest to the German government about extermination activities in the camps. In October 1944, Radio Bulletins and Telegrams were being sent from Washington and Bern to the German government warning the Germans to cease such heinous activities. These messages warned of reprisals against them should they continue with the executions:

"United states Government has been informed by the Polish Government that it had received reliable information that German officials in Poland are making plans for the extermination of tens of thousands of innocent persons of Polish and other United Nations nationalities as well as Jewish deportees from areas under German control who are now held in concentration camps, particulaarly those at Brzezinki and Oswiecim. United States Government takes this occasion to warn again the German Government and Nazi officials that if these plans are carried out those guilty of such murderous acts will be brought to justice and pay the penalty of their heinous crimes." [53]

Bringing the above-quoted documents back to a discussion of the main character being discussed in this paper, it should not be forgotten that Ernst Zundel continues to promote a vicious racist ideology of hate from his `Zundlehaus' in Toronto to this day. As he did in the days leading up to charges first being brought against him in the eighties, most of the material that he publishes and distributes is what we call of the `denier' type. He has even written and designed some of this material, as Deborah Lipstadt reminds us, and there is no doubt whatsoever that his ultimate agenda is a Nazi revival:

"Though much of the material he distributed was written by other neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and right-wing extremists, Zundel himself contributed two books to this melange. The Hitler We Loved and Why, which was published by White Power Publications in West Virginia, portrayed Hitler as a saintly man, a messianic figure whose white supremacist ideology had brought salvation to Germany. It concluded with the proclamation that Hitler's spirit `soars beyond the shores of the White Man's home in Europe. Where we are , he is with us. WE LOVE YOU, ADOLPH HITLER! His book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?, argued that UFOs were Hitler's secret weapon and are actually still in use at bases in the Antarctic beneath the earth's surface. In addition Zundel wrote and distributed scores of fliers and pamphlets praising Nazism, advocating fascism, and denying the Holocaust." [54]

A CALL FOR THE IMMEDIATE EXTRADITION OF ERNST ZUNDEL TO HIS NATIVE GERMANY AND FOR MORE CENSORSHIP TO PROTECT CANADIAN CIVILIZATION FROM THE BARBARISM OF THE SO-CALLED `REVISIONISTS'

Zundel has never had his immigration status in Canada completely regularized, and yet, strangely, has been allowed to stay in the country since the late sixties. Why he is allowed to stay there, in light of his well-known penchant for fomenting racial animosities, is a question Canadian authorities seem unable to answer. He is persona non grata in his native Germany.

To anyone with eyes and ears open in the late twentieth century, Zundel's particular brand of `revisionism' is not all that unusual. What is unusual, and admitedly very upsetting to those who recognize his true agenda for what it is, is the extent to which he is able to continue propagating his lies year after year, with apparent impunity. Let us admit freely that many of us find it absolutely galling that this man is harboured in a country that purports to value and protect freedom. Why should Canada give freedoms to this twice-convicted hate-monger? Let us extradite him to his beloved Germany, and let them deal with their own wayward son. I suggest that the German government has abrogated its responsibilities by not working expeditiously in this respect with the Canadian government. Both governments must work together to stop this man from further poisoning the social compacts of Canada, Germany and many other countries to which he continues to send his hate `literature.'

The `liberal' (or `libertarian') arguments for `free speech rights' have affected the thinking of everyone in the twentieth century, but perhaps the time has come to seriously revisit and curtail them. Certainly, a very strong argument can now be made that the incidence of violence in the 20th century has been so high as to be quite literally obscene. There must also be a relationship between this violence and the fact that we have raised so-called `free-speech rights' to a level where we seem to value their protection over the protection of human life itself. In a political arena of licentiousness, we invite demagogues to seduce us. Once they do that, they then proceed to slaughter our best people.

In making a false god of so-called `free speech rights' that can be enjoyed and abused by history deniers and falsifiers, we make a travesty of the very civilization we purport to love and value. Does it really make us feel that much more sophisticated to give the perverted ideas of these people the kind of respectability they certainly never will warrent? Whenwe know that these ideas are deadly and fascistic, why do we persist in affording them such liberties? We run the risk, in our anxiety to be all things to them, of allowing them to spread more of their errors to those most susceptible to them: to the unemployed, to the disenfranchised, and to the alienated. These are the same constituencies that thy have traditionally targeted: they prey on the misery of the powerless, the underemployed and the working class. But I digress...

As I began to suggest in the introductory remarks to this paper, my thinking is becoming increasingly interested in the imaginative ways that a civilization such as ours can rethink the sanctity of human life, and put free speech in its proper place. Yes, I am talking about censorship, and no, I'm not prepared to wax philosophical about the rights of the deniers to further propagate their lies. The time has surely come to assert that we are civilized, and intend to remain civilized, and never will we allow ourselves to revert back to that kind of barbarism again. By `civilized' I mean that we put the very highest premium on human life itself, and that we relegate every other consideration whatsover (including the long- vaunted `free speech rights') to a position subordinate to it.

NOTES

1. Lipstadt, 26.

2. Hoffman, 18.

3. Hoffman, 12.

4. Lenski, 15.

5. Hoffman, 12.

6. Hoffman, 12.

7. Hoffman, 12-13.

8. Hoffman, 13.

9. Lenski, 17.

10. Lenski, 17.

11. Lenski, 16.

12. Hoffman, 17.

13. Hoffman, 17-18.

14. Lenski, 17.

15. Lenski, 17.

16. Hoffman, 19.

17. Hoffman, 20.

18. Hoffman, 21.

19. Hoffman, 21.

20. Hoffman, 26.

21. Littman, ed., 29.

22. Hoffman, 26.

23. Littman, ed., 29.

24. Hoffman, 27.

25. Hoffman, 27-28.

26. Hoffman, 28.

27. Hoffman, 28.

28. Lenski, 18.

29. Littman, ed., 29.

30. Littman, ed., 29.

31. Lenski, 19.

32. Littman, ed., 29-30.

33. Smith, IHR cassette T-57.

34. Christie, IHR cassette T-57.

35. Lenski, 25.

36. Lenski, 20.

37. Lenski, 25-26.

38. Lenski, 26.

39. Hoffman, 73.

40. Hoffman, 72.

41. Hoffman, 76.

42. Lenski, 27.

43. Hoffman, 78.

44. Littman, ed., 30.

45. Littman, ed., 15.

46. Goldhagen, 466.

47. Dawidowicz, 65.

48. Dawidowicz, 66-67.

49. Arad, Gutman, Margilot, eds., 30.

50. Arad, Gutman, Margilot, eds., 23.

51. Arad, Gutman, Margilot, eds., 20.

52. Moseley, A-2.

53. U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, eds., 305.

54. Lipstadt, 157-158.

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ZUNDEL & CHRISTIE RESOURCES IN USF HISTORY DEPARTMENT

The following items were purchased on behalf of the University of San Francisco History Department Library, as per suggestion of Professor Elliot Neaman, and are now available there for future reference. ALL are from the Institute for Historical Review, with Invoice Stock Nos. (Cassette Label Nos.,when different, shown in brackets, italicized), Invoice Titles (Cassette or Videotape Label Titles in brackets), and Recording Dates, and 1997 Prices Paid:

AUDIOCASSETTES

1. A057 [T-57], Free Press Award to Doug Chris (1986 Seventh Revisionist Conference, Banquet Dinner Speakers, Bradley Smith and Douglas H. Christie), 1986, $9.95.

2. A098, Zuendel / Bradley Smith / Countess (10th Int'l Revisionist Conference, Revisionism & The Media, Revisionism in Germany Today, Bradley Smith / Robert Countess), 1990, $9.95.

3. A117, Ernst Zuendel / Victory (11th Int'l Revisionist Conference, Victory in Canada's Supreme Court, Ernst Zuendel), 1992, $9.95.

4. A078, Briefing on the Zuendel Trial I (Institute for Historical Review, March 27, 1988, Briefing on the Zuendel Trial [Part 1]), 1988, $6.00.

5. A079 [T-79], Briefing on the Zuendel Trial II (Institute for Historical Review, March 27th, 1988 IHR, Briefing on the Zuendel Trial, Part 2), 1988, $6.00.

VIDEOTAPE

1. V114, Ernst Zuendel (Institute for Historical Review Twelfth International Revisionist Conference, September 3-5, 1994, IHR Videotape No. V114, Ernst Zundel), 1994, $29.00.

BOOK

1. 0963, Holocaust on Trial (The Holocaust on Trial: The Case of Ernst Zundel), by Robert Lenski, Reporter Press, P.O. Box 726, Decatur, Ala. 35602, U. S. A., Printed in Argentina by Editorial Revision, 1989, $25.00.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Arad, Gutman & Margaliot, editors, Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1981.

2. Dawidowicz, Lucy S., The Holocaust and the Historians, Harvard Universtiy Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981.

3. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust, Vintage Books, New York, 1997.

4. Hoffman II, Michael A., The Great Holocaust Trial (Third Commemorative Edition), Wiswell Ruffin House, Dresden, New York, 1995.

5. Lenski, Robert, The Holocaust on Trial: The Case of Ernst Zundel, Reporter Press, Decatur, Alabama, 1989.

6. Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume Books, New York, 1993.

7. Littman, Sol, editor, Holocaust Denial: Bigotry in the Guise of Scholarship, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Toronto, Ontario, 1994.

8. Moseley, Ray, Disclosures Show West Knew About Holocaust Early, San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1997.

9. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Fifty Years Ago: Darkness Before Dawn, 1994 Days of Remembrance, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D. C., 1994.