For Ernst Zündel

These lines are not addressed to those who already know Ernst Zündel – the man, his deeds and his writings – but to the Canadians who know only what the mass media, taken together, have chosen to report about him. It may be feared that those Canadians have been led to misjudge E. Zündel and, perhaps, hate him.

To those people, who, in my view, are mistaken, I should say: examine with care the image of this man that most of the media in your country try to give you, whilst practically never letting you hear his voice. Use your discernment. To start, be on your guard against the repetitive, hollow and vague nature of the accusations brought against him. Do not let yourselves be taken in by the obsessive use of words like “Nazi” or “anti-Semite”. These terms are used against him as easily and mechanically as stock insults. They are not born of any attempt at analysis. Quite the contrary: it is people who want to spare themselves just such an effort who resort to them. These words are employed to kill those to whom they are applied or, at the very least, to gag or send them to prison. Most often they are vituperations let fly to vent spleen. Uttering them is somewhat like spitting, and spitting has never been an argument.

Ask yourselves whether E. Zündel, rather than the monster described for you, may not quite simply be a man attached to his country of origin, Germany, whose desire is to defend his homeland against horrific slanders.

If you hear it said that he “denies the Holocaust of the Jews”, reflect once again. Has he really asserted that, during the Second World War, the Jews did not suffer? The answer is “No”. Has he actually maintained that Germany had no anti-Jewish policy then? The answer again is “No”. Has he seriously claimed that Jews were not deported to concentration camps or labour camps? The answer is yet again “No”. Has he advocated racial discrimination, or can there be found in his past any sign of racist behaviour towards those with whom he has had contact as, for instance, their employer? Still once more the answer is “No”.

But then, if I am right and if I take it upon myself to tell you that E. Zündel has never held the ideas falsely ascribed to him, how is it that the mass media, in unison, have hidden this fact from you? Ask yourselves. And try to find the answer.

I shall briefly tell you what E. Zündel has thought and written in the past and what he continues to think today in the prison where, for over a year, he his being held like the most dangerous of criminals.

Like me and a fair number of other revisionists, he challenges, on the strength of solid arguments, documents and forensic reports, the core of what the Jews call their “Holocaust” or “Shoah”. Upon the conclusion of his research, he found that Adolf Hitler had indeed sought a final solution to the eternal Jewish question but, as is spelled out in plain writing in the relevant documents, a “territorial final solution”. He also found that an extermination of the Jews had never been contemplated, much less undertaken, but rather, as had often happened in the history of certain countries, a transfer of the Jews out of Europe: the “territorial final solution was to have been the Jews’ resettlement in an autonomous territory of their own outside of Europe, anywhere except Palestine. As for the rest of E. Zündel’s findings I shall, the better to make myself understood, draw your attention to current events and the war in Iraq. You have heard that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction”. You know that such talk is a cold lie and that this lie made possible a military butchery, a crusade of Good against Evil. War has always been hand in glove with propaganda, in all times and places. Still, to take but this one example amongst thousands of others, in the recent century, during the 1930s and 1940s, a frenzied propaganda was built up, especially in the great democracies of the West and the Soviet Union, against the Axis powers (“the axis of Evil”, in a sense) and, especially, against Germany. The Allies thereby stirred their own soldiers to warlike ardour and, after the vast butchery, justified their own war and their own war crimes by heaping gruesome accusations on Germany. It was claimed, in particular, that Hitler had ordered the building of weapons of mass destruction and used those weapons to kill the Jews in a methodical manner and in industrial proportions. In fact, no trace of any such order has ever been found, nor any trace of the satanic weapons called “[execution] gas chambers” or “[execution] gas vans”, and all the alleged “testimonies” of the existence and operation of such chemical slaughterhouses have shown themselves to be fraudulent. This is what so soundly struck E. Zündel. This is what he, ever since, has wanted to bring to the eyes of the world. It is this staggering discovery of colossal deceit that has led him to fight as he has done and as he will do till his dying breath. It is for this, and solely for this, that he is now being killed by inches.

We have all been told that the rarest of virtues is the courage to fight for what one believes is true: the maxim is taught in the schools and universities, in the works of great literature and in picture books. It is a virtue much admired in certain men and women of the past. But when, suddenly, the living example of such courage appears in present reality, too often people fail to recognise it. They neglect it, or are mistaken about it. Trusting in appearances, they lend a willing ear to the rumours circulating with regard to the extraordinary person and, one fine day, unawares, find themselves in the camp of the slanderers. Having believed they had a great love of justice, they show themselves ready to uphold Lynch law in the face of this nuisance to society and to the fashionable way of thinking.

I may add that if you knew E. Zündel you would respect him for his open-mindedness, intelligence, understanding of the most various kinds of people, and sincerity. Then, upon discovering the true personality of Zündel the peasant, the artist, the thinker, you would very likely get the idea: “I was wrong about him. I’ve been fooled. In my thoughts and words, by my acts or omissions, I’ve condemned a man who, in reality, is a credit to his nation, to my own and to the whole human race”. You would ask yourselves how to right the wrongs that have been done.

I have the solution. Take your example from E. Zündel. If his ideas do not appeal to you, leave them to him but borrow a bit of his courage. Protest against the fate reserved for him up to today in a “high security” cell near Toronto and denounce the sham proceedings that an alleged justice system is conducting against him.

In Canada, Paul Fromm organises, with the greatest selflessness, the defence of our prisoner of conscience. To join in the support of E. Zündel, start by helping Paul Fromm.

I thank you.

March 21, 2004