Ernst Zündel

Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel (born April 24, 1939) is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer.

Zündel emigrated to Canada from West Germany when he was 19 in order to avoid being conscripted by the German military. During the 1960s he came under the tutelage of Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand.

In 1968 he ran in that year's Liberal Party of Canada leadership convention using it as a platform to allege that Canadian society was replete with anti-German attitudes . He received no votes and came in last place, losing to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Professionally, Zundel worked as a graphic artist and printer, on several occasions he was commissioned to illustrate covers for Maclean's Magazine. His views on Nazism and Jews were not well known in the 1960s and 1970s and he initially published his views under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.

In the 1970s and 1980s Zündel operated a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers which issued such pamphlets as The Hitler We Loved and Why and Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood aka Richard Verrall (a British neo-Nazi leader) as well as booklets claiming that UFOs were actually Nazi secret weapons operated from secret Nazi military bases in Antarctica.

In 1985 he was criminally charged for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust." Zündel's trial was notable for its reliance on testimony from individuals such as David Irving and Fred A. Leuchter, a self-styled expert in gas chambers whose testimony was dismissed due to his lack of any engineering credentials. Zündel was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court but in 1991 his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada when the law he had been charged under, reporting false news, was ruled unconstitutional.

In the late 1990s he was under investigation by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for promoting hatred against Jews via his website when he left Canada for Tennessee vowing never to return.

In 2003, Zündel was arrested in the United States for violating that country's immigration rules. He was deported to Canada despite the fact that he is a German citizen and his permanent residency status in Canada had expired due to his prolonged absence from the country.

Zündel remains in detention in Canada as a security threat due to his alleged links with violent neo-Nazi groups. He is resisting deportation to Germany where he is wanted for hate crimes and is seeking refugee status in Canada.

Quotes about Ernst Zündel:

"If Ernst Zündel is a refugee, Daffy Duck is Albert Einstein... Some propositions are so ludicrous that they are a betrayal of common sense and human dignity if allowed a moment's oxygen." -- Rex Murphy

Quotes by Ernst Zündel:

"I have always seen blunders in my life not as stumbling blocks, but as stepping stones."
"The Jews of the world have a Holocaust coming."