Born in Germany in 1939, Zundel’s childhood memories were of “hunger, cold, sickness,” and life under occupation. He came to Canada in 1958 to learn to be a photo retoucher. While in Canada he was greatly influenced by the country’s leading antisemite and neo-Nazi, Adrien Arcand, who introduced him to a group of ardent antisemites including Paul Rassinier. Zundel recalled that Arcand “made a German out of me.” Zundel built a professional reputation as an accomplished photo retoucher. Most of his clients, which included Canada’s leading magazines, did not know that he was one of the country’s most active distributors of neo-Nazi material. One customer who inadvertently came into his shop discovered a huge swastika on the wall surrounded by pictures of Hitler and other Nazis.{5}
During his trial the prosecution stressed Zundel’s ardent devotion to Hitler, allegiance to the Nazis, advocacy of revolution in the Federal Republic of Germany, and his belief that the white race’s position in the world had deteriorated because of the success of an international Zionist conspiracy. Israel was a “terrorist state,” which was “financially and morally bankrupt,” and Zionists controlled the “moguls” in Bonn.{6}
Found guilty in 1985 and sentenced to fifteen months in prison, Zundel was given a temporary reprieve when the ruling was overturned on appeal because of procedural errors.[2] The second trial, which began in 1988, was memorable because it served to set off the deniers’ most important salvo—fired by a newcomer to the movement who was guided into Holocaust denial by Zundel’s team of advisers—in their assault on the truth since the publication of Arthur Butz’s book. Zundel’s lawyer, Douglas Christie, the main legal defender of Holocaust deniers, antisemites, Nazi war criminals, and neo-Nazis in Canada, came to Zundel’s attention when he defended Jim Keegstra, a schoolteacher in Red Deer, Alberta. Keegstra, who denied the Holocaust, taught his students that a group of Jews called the “Illuminati” was behind all the revolutions and debts in the world since the 1700s and that Judaism was an evil religion. He believed it his Christian duty to fight the evil conspiracy controlled by Jews (John D. Rockefeller was declared to be a Jew) through their money system.{7} The worst Jews were Talmudic Jews, though such “atheistical” Jews as Leon Trotsky were also a danger.{8} Zionism was a Jewish fraud, and the Holocaust was a hoax.{9} (The most disturbing aspect of the Keegstra case was that he taught this array of material for fourteen years before anyone complained.)
Christie’s tactics during the first Zundel trial were the subject of great controversy. He tried to have all potential jurors who were Jewish or who had Jewish friends or relatives screened out. Treating Holocaust survivors in a brutal fashion, calling one a liar and insisting that another give him the full names of at least twenty family members who had been killed in the camps,{10} he exhibited what Ontario Lawyers Weekly described as “sheer nastiness.” In the midst of cross-examining Raul Hilberg, Christie asked him if he recognized a certain historical tract and then declared, “I thought you might—you’re a historian of sorts.”{11} He managed to structure his defense so that it seemed to some observers that the Holocaust, not Zundel, was on trial.{12} For Christie the chief issue in the trial was the Zionist “power” to curtail freedom of speech. He declared the belief that the Nazis killed six million Jews during the Holocaust to be the result of brainwashing, and told the jury that they were being prevented from asking questions about the Holocaust.{13}
In addition, Robert Faurisson came to Canada to advise Zundel and his lawyers. One of the world’s leading deniers, he was a proponent of the notion that it was technically and physically impossible for the gas chambers at Auschwitz to have functioned as extermination facilities. Faurisson argued that compared to American execution chambers the German facilities were too small and primitive to have been killing chambers.{14} Faurisson, who testified as an expert witness for the defense during the first trial, was asked by the Crown to explain the missing six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Faurisson acknowledged that he did not know what happened to them but urged surviving Jews to give him the names of family members they had lost so he could try to locate them.{15}
At the second trial Christie and Faurisson were joined by David Irving, who flew to Toronto in January 1988 to assist in the preparation of Zundel’s second defense and to testify on his behalf. Scholars have described Irving as a “Hitler partisan wearing blinkers” and have accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes.{16} He is best known for his thesis that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution, an idea that scholars have dismissed.{17} The prominent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper depicted Irving as a man who “seizes on a small and dubious particle of ‘evidence,’” using it to dismiss far-more-substantial evidence that may not support his thesis. His work has been described as “closer to theology or mythology than to history,” and he has been accused of skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler.{18} An ardent admirer of the Nazi leader, Irving placed a self-portrait of Hitler over his desk, described his visit to Hitler’s mountaintop retreat as a spiritual experience,{19} and declared that Hitler repeatedly reached out to help the Jews.{20} In 1981 Irving, a self-described “moderate fascist,” established his own right-wing political party, founded on his belief that he was meant to be a future leader of Britain.{21} He is an ultranationalist who believes that Britain has been on a steady path of decline accelerated by its misguided decision to launch a war against Nazi Germany. He has advocated that Rudolf Hess should have received the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts to try to stop war between Britain and Germany.{22} On some level Irving seems to conceive of himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in June 1992, he related that his one mistake in life was getting married: “Marriage is a detour.” This was, Irving observed, something Hitler understood. Irving related that Hitler’s naval adjutant once told him how Hitler decided he could not marry because Germany “was his bride.” Irving asked when the German leader had informed the naval adjutant of this decision. When told the date was March 24, 1938, Irving responded, “Herr Admiral, at that moment I was being born.”{23}
Irving had long equated the actions of Hitler and Allied leaders, an equivalence that was made easier by his claims that the Final Solution took place without Hitler’s knowledge. Prior to participating in Zundel’s trial, Irving had appeared at IHR conferences—at one he declared Hitler the “biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich”—but he had never denied the annihilation of the Jews.{24} That changed in 1988 as a result of the events in Toronto.
Both Irving and Faurisson advocated inviting an American prison warden who had performed gas executions to testify in Zundel’s defense, arguing that this would be the best tactic for proving that the gas chambers were a fraud and too primitive to operate safely. They solicited help from Bill Armontrout, warden of the Missouri State Penitentiary, who agreed to testify and suggested they also contact Fred A. Leuchter, an “engineer” residing in Boston who specialized in constructing and installing execution apparatus. Irving and Faurisson immediately flew off to meet Leuchter. Irving, who had long hovered at the edge of Holocaust denial, believed that Leuchter’s testimony could provide the documentation he needed to prove the Holocaust a myth.{25} According to Faurisson, when he first met Leuchter, the Bostonian accepted the “standard notion of the ‘Holocaust.’”{26} After spending two days with him, Faurisson declared that Leuchter was convinced that it was chemically and physically impossible for the Germans to have conducted gassings.{27} Having agreed to serve as an expert witness for the defense, Leuchter then went to Toronto to meet with Zundel and Christie and to examine the materials they had gathered for the trial.
2
The jury found him guilty of spreading false information about the Holocaust but acquitted him on charges connected with “The West, War, and Islam.”