Defence lawyer dismissed in Holocaust denier's trial

The trial of Ernst Zundel, a leading Holocaust denier, opened today with the judge dismissing a defence lawyer, himself a well-known far-right activist who was convicted of incitement earlier this year.

Soon after, the trial was adjourned until next Tuesday to allow for a ruling on a defence motion calling for the judge’s removal.

The judge, defence attorney Juergen Rieger said “only wants defence lawyers who adopt the views of the prosecution.”

Zundel, 66, who wrote the book The Hitler We Loved and Why, faces charges of incitement, libel and disparaging the dead.

He was deported from Canada eight months ago after authorities there ruled he posed a threat to national and international security.

Shortly after the trial opened, Judge Ulrich Meinerzhagen dismissed defence attorney Horst Mahler on grounds he was barred from practising earlier this year after he was convicted of incitement for distributing anti-Semitic propaganda.

Meinerzhagen further questioned whether the rest of Zundel’s defence team would be prepared to mount a “regular” case after one of them described Jews as an “enemy people” in a motion.

Zundel, a stocky man wearing jeans and a blazer, said little as he sat among his attorneys. If convicted, he could be jailed for up to five years. He insists he is a peaceful campaigner being denied the right to free speech.

Dozens of his supporters packed the courtroom, and Meinerzhagen threatened to clear them all out when many shouted “Shame!” as the defence complained it was being muzzled.

“These are measures not even used in the gulags in the Soviet Union,” defence attorney Juergen Rieger told the judge. He said that Zundel was targeted for “stepping on the toes of the Jewish community.”

A prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier since the late 1970s, Zundel ran Samisdat Publishers, a leading distributor of Nazi propaganda.

He also provides content to The Zundelsite on the web, which has followers around the world – hundreds of whom demonstrated against his arrest by German authorities in March.

Ahead of the trial, the International Auschwitz Committee said survivors of the death camp see the trial as “an important success” in the international cooperation against Holocaust deniers who use the internet to spread anti-Semitism.

German authorities accuse Zundel of decades of anti-Semitic activities, including repeated denials of the Holocaust – a crime in Germany – in documents and on the internet.

Their 20-page indictment cites Zundel’s texts dating from 1999 to 2003, which prosecutors say demonstrate his attempts “in a pseudo-scientific way, to relieve National Socialism of the stain of the murder of the Jews.”

Zundel “denied the fate of destruction for the Jews planned by National Socialist powerholders and justified this by saying that the mass destruction in Auschwitz and Treblinka, among others, were an invention of the Jews and served the repression and blackmail of the German people,” it says.

Born in Germany in 1939, Zundel emigrated to Canada in 1958 and lived in Toronto and Montreal until 2001. Canadian officials rejected his attempts to obtain citizenship in 1966 and 1994.

He then moved to the US state of Tennessee, where he married fellow right-wing extremist Ingrid Rimland, but was deported to Canada in 2003 for alleged immigration violations.

German authorities, who had already arrested Zundel during a visit to Germany in 1991 and fined him about €5,900 for agitation, obtained a new arrest warrant for him in 2003.

Because Zundel’s Holocaust-denying web site was available in Germany, he is considered to have been spreading his message to Germans.

Rimland, who runs his website from the United States, said in an email the charges were “politically tainted and unworthy of a country that calls itself a democracy.

The court aims to reach a verdict by November 24.