Power Letter - September 1995

(Ernst Zündel)

Zündel Headquarters are being rebuilt at a frantic pace!

New Cable TV-Stations are added to our already existing list. New sponsors are being found weekly! More radio stations are soon to be added to the existing line-up!

Nizkor, the Holocaust Promotion Lobby Website, has asked for a link with the Zundelsite - which means the great electronic Holocaust debate is here and the world can listen in, watch, read - and DECIDE who has the better evidence!

Hans Schmidt was refused bail and is still in jail in Schwerin, Germany!

Attorney Jürgen Rieger, Zündel defense lawyer in Germany, was the victim of a vicious assassination attempt in Hamburg!

Gerhard Lauck, American National Socialist, was extradited from Denmark to Germany, where he will be tried ". . . for spreading National Socialist propaganda" - a possible five-year-term awaits him!

Ewald Althans receives a combined sentence of 3 1/2 years in Germany for producing and distributing Revisionist videos and for arguing with a Jew in the Auschwitz gas chamber!

To my friends around the world!

Fall is approaching in Canada. Last week we had to heat the building for the first time, and we still have gaping holes where there had once been windows. Our new bullet- and shatterproof windows have not yet arrived, but the rest of the rebuilding effort is proceeding at a dizzying pace. The roof is on - it consumed barrels of tar and two tons of gravel! The white aluminum siding is almost all nailed to the plywood exterior and the insulation and drywall is almost all taken care of. Now the taping, filling in of cracks, and sanding is proceeding. One area of the top floor is already covered with a coat of primer. I thought I would never see the end of it - but now it looks as though the top floor will be finished in a week. The kitchen, dining room and the radio room should be finished the week after.

What a relief!

Then the great wash-up and clean-up can begin. We have a layer of gypsum dust covering everything like sugar coating. The electricity should also be connected by next week. Sinks, stove and new fridges will round out the picture, and then the upset about the arson inflicted by Toronto's anarchists will, hopefully, die down and life will return to a productive and constructive routine.

While all this activity was going on, the regular work of churning out the TV programs continued and the newsletters went out, files were being sorted, photos were being scanned and screened for use in books and publications and for future availability stored on a CD ROM disk. The more than 60 Public Access shows a week had to be prepared, labeled, wrapped, logged, weighed - and shipped out all over the United States. Practically every week, new stations are being signed up - one in Schenectady and another one in Niagara Falls - because we found new sponsors in these communities. Public access. for so long the stepchild of television, has now in many cases become the only "official" means to hear an alternate point of view.

Our World Wide Website - dubbed the "Zundelsite" so it can easily be found on the Net by searching for the name - is causing apprehension among our enemies. You may remember that our first attempt at signing with a server was canceled after less than a month because the server caved in to Leftist threats. This new one seems to be much more courageous and principled, although almost immediately after we went on the air there was a serious attempt to have us kicked off. So far, so good! Thousands of people have already visited the Zundelsite - all the way from places like Japan, Malaysia, Israel, Norway, New Zealand, Mexico and others. Tellingly, our still very skimpy news features (there simply is no time!) and the "Letters to the Zundelsite" cause the strongest interest. Next in line are articles subtiled as "Politically Incorrect News."

"Linking with the Enemy?"

The Nizkor group, a Holocaust Promotion lobby group, has contacted us and offered an exchange of links on the Internet. The Zundelsite would contain a link to their Website so anybody having questions on either side can easily peruse the other side's material. Although they are far more lavishly financed (some Victoria, BC synagogue is raising tax-deductible funds for them, it seems . . . ) we welcome the challenge and know that we will hold our own. It is again a "David versus Goliath" situation, but I have agreed to it in principle. Now we have to prepare our answers to the many queries that will come our way - via this "Jewish connection."

We are reprinting below the correspondence we had from Nizkor and with Nizkor. Their arrogance and strident tone might offend and shock you - not to worry! An intelligent public who will be reading all this material will soon see the difference in manners, level of culture and quality of our documentation and research. We will leave the temper tantrums and spoiled-brat attitudes to them.

We've got serious work to do, goals to achieve, minds to open and people to liberate from the effects of relentless and vicious brainwashing. After all, the Holocaust is merely the tap root of something much, much bigger - it threatens the very survival not only of our race but Western civilization. More and more people are realizing this.

Here is how the exchange, so far, has taken place, as posted on the Internet:

Yesterday, September 1, 1995, we received an e-mail message we view with surprise and ambivalence. In view of the importance we attach to this message, we want to conduct our communication with the Nizkor Project people in public.

This is the communiquČ we received. We post it here in full - shortened only by subtracting "computerese". It is followed by our reply.

Mr. Zuendel,

My name is Jamie McCarthy. I am co-webmaster of the Nizkor web site. As I imagine you know by now, Nizkor is dedicated to the refutation of the nonsense that is Holocaust-denial.

We have a collection of links to other sites on the web that are related to the Holocaust and its denial, and among them, of course, yours.

You claim that you are interested in helping people discover the truth (in your comment about truth vs. coercion, at the bottom of each page on your site). A page of yours with a piece by Bradley Smith, indicates that you are in favor of "a free marketplace of ideas." Your piece by Mark Weber proclaims in 24-point type, "Let Both Sides Be Heard."

I agree completely, Mr. Zuendel - I am opposed to "gag laws" against Holocaust-denial or any other offensive type of speech, and I am very much in favor of the "free marketplace of ideas." That is why, on the site I co-webmaster, I have provided links to everything I could find on the net related to the Holocaust and its denial, whether I agree with it or not.

The question, Mr. Zuendel, is: are you?

I propose a test case. I am currently preparing a response to the lie-filled propaganda which the IHR calls "66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust." You make this available on your site. When I finish editing the responses, I will include links to your web page, so that people can see not only what you have to say about it, in your own words, but also can jump back to your table of contents and look around to see what else you are saying.

I would like your pledge, Mr. Zuendel, that when the response I'm editing is complete, you will do the same for me - that you will put a link on your "66 Questions and Answers" page to the page on the Nizkor site that deals with those questions and answers.

Given that you claim, over and over, that "truth has no need of coercion," I trust that you will not insult your readers' intelligence by hiding from them an alternative viewpoint on those 66 Q&A.

Thank you.

Jamie McCarthy jamie@voyager.net jrm0@aol.com

I speak only for myself. Co-Webmaster of http://www.almanac.bc.ca/ Unless otherwise specified, I consider pro-"revisionism" email public domain.

Ernst Zündel responds:

Thank you kindly for your offer to make the Internet the open forum on which we can discuss, in a mature and civilized fashion, what is of such concern to all of us - namely what did or did not happen during what is, in our opinion, most inappropriately called "The Holocaust."

We want to get away from the mud-slinging and settle down to science and reason - as I am sure you do. In point of fact, we should have done this years ago - before the Canadian Holocaust Trials. We would have spared Canada a painful, acrimonious debate and the Canadian tax payers millions of dollars because they had to pay to have me prosecuted at the behest of Jewish individuals. Had we been able then to have an open debate, maybe we would have laid some ghosts to rest. At least that was my hope.

I offered this public debate on the Holocaust in the early 1980s to the Canadian Jewish community, even inviting in writing well-known personalities like Dr. Morton Shulman and broadcaster Barbara Frum (both Jewish) to chair such a symposium. I offered a university setting and publicly stated, as an alternate option, that I would pay half of the rent for Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto's famous sports arena, if the other side paid half for this or a similar locale. I even enlisted the Chief of Police and was promised the assistance of the Police Ethnic Squad who broached the idea to Jewish community leaders - who promptly rejected the offer of a dialogue.

In other words - no takers!

Has this now changed? We would be overjoyed if your offer were genuine and sanctioned by the people who support the Nizkor Project. Were this the case, then serious dialogue could begin. Your offer is precisely what we have been hoping for - to be able to put our information out in the open for the entire world to see and to inspect. Intelligent people can judge for themselves and should not be denied what we consider valid and respectable forensic, historical, scientific and anecdotal data gathered world-wide by experts and ordinary citizens alike refuting serious charges routinely made - such as the extermination of races by gassing.

The information you present has been available for fifty years, broadcast from every roof top and officially rubber-stamped as "truth" and "fact" and "sanctified" by the Nuremberg Trials - proceedings that were described by the American Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Judge Harlan Fiske Stone, at the time of these trials, as "a high grade lynching party" and a "sanctimonious fraud."

In the wake of half a century of unrelieved emotional abuse about what Germans and their allies allegedly did, we have not been allowed an appropriate defense. We have been harassed, beaten, bombed, fire-bombed, criminally charged, convicted, imprisoned, judicially gagged - and some of our fellow revisionists were even murdered! - for trying to explain and to defend our view of our people's history. We, the victims of this persecution, agree that this must stop - if freedom of speech is to be preserved in what is left of the rest of the so-called "Free World."

As a matter of fact, we were discussing the very offer you have made to us yesterday with some of our leading revisionists and scholars just recently - how we could cross-link with you and get you to agree to cross-link with us so that both sides could be heard equally. Are you sure you have checked out this idea with your superiors? It has been our experience in the past that lower echelon people who are ". . . believers in the Holocaust" are just as eager as we are to evaluate both sides of the issue, but that, in the past, players "behind the scenes" who have hidden agendas and political goals would not agree to a free and open debate.

Please give us a couple of weeks so we can consult with other revisionists, scholars, our technical people and with our attorneys. We will be back with a response that will be fair to all.

Sincerely, Ernst Zündel

If we can get the world's intellectuals to join in on this venture, then the best argument WILL win. Truth cannot be destroyed. As long as a wonderful medium like Internet is open to us, we have our work cut out! If we get kicked off or otherwise censored, then you know who is fearing a debate!

Update on Hans Schmidt:

This could be quite an opportunity for a Zündel-type trial, which could serve to raise a very high profile for Hans Schmidt and the cause of Revisionism. Maybe the arrest and trial of Hans Schmidt can yet result in the test case for which we prepared with Fred Leuchter and which we did not manage to get with Ewald Althans either. Hans Schmidt seems to me to be a man with staying power, a good command of language and of the issues involved, and also with a circle of mature friends in many places who can help him financially see this case through all the way to the highest level of court in Germany and then on to the European Human Rights Commission in Stražburg - if need be, even to the doors of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

So, what does all this mean? My guess is that eventually cooler heads will prevail in the German ruling oligarchy, that maybe this arrest was premature as judged from the Leftist point of view, and that Hans Schmidt will soon be offered some kind of a face-saving deal. Should Hans not take the deal because of a principled stand, I suspect that then he might well be summarily convicted (as I was at that level) by the so-called "German Justice System" using a judge who will simply adopt as "true" all the information contained in the "Haftbefehl" (arrest warrant) and use this information as his justification for a summary conviction leading to an enormous fine.

This happened in my case in 1991. Just so my readers understand what is involved and how "the system" plays in Germany: I was convicted in Munich on a smiliar charge to a fine of DM 31,600 or over half a year in jail - I suspect (unless things have deteriorated much more in Germany than even I suspect!) that Hans will be summarily convicted to a fine of approximately $35,000 or the equivalent time to be served in a German jail. He can only get out of that jail then if he accepts his "conviction" and signs a form to that effect. If he does that, he would - or should I say, could? - be released, after he signs another form stating that he will appeal his conviction and that he will show up for trial at the appointed date. (This might have changed after the judge's treatment by the media because they let Leuchter leave for America.)

In my case, that's all there was to it! They handed me my passport, my belongings, my conviction, and I was free to go! No bail money or property surety needed to be deposited with the authorities. I think that the idea is that the "convicted-in-the-first-instance" accused political "offender" will hightail it immediately out of Germany, scared out of his wits, and never return, thus "having learned a salutory lesson" and the Germans get to "prove" to the world how tough they are on Nazis! This is, indeed, what seems in retrospect to have happened to Fred Leuchter who simply could not take the stress, inconvenience and unfairness of a trial in Germany.

Well, in my case the authorities seemed horrified when I returned and organized a state-of-the-art Revisionist trial with lots of media preparation, postcard campaigns etc., flying experts like Fred Leuchter and Dr. Faurisson in to Munich at my own expense and inviting the German chemist Germar Rudolf, having all these highly competent, impressive witnesses wait in the witness room next to where I was being tried. to be called up to testify. We were all set. We thought there would be "justice" in Germany!

What followed next was a disgusting display of unfairness, twisting and bending of laws, dropping of some inconvenient charges (such as the challenged authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary so that the expert Dr. Faurisson, who had written a scholarly book about it, was no longer necessary!) dismissing Leuchter for "not being qualified," and denying a German-trained chemical expert, Germar Rudolf, expert status - now listen why! - because he was not listed in his hometown telephone book of Stuttgart as "Gutachter," - that is, "expert"! Additionally, the trial was conducted over a seven-week period at the rate of one day a week - in other words, it was a clear attempt to try to grind us down financially - so that I had to remain in Europe for almost two months, return to Canada to appear before the Supreme Court here, and return to Germany just before Christmas to be read my conviction to a reduced fine or a little more than half a year's worth of jail if I did not pay my fine. My Hamburg-based attorney had to fly back and forth from Hamburg to Munich for each day's court appearance.

I appealed that verdict again. I lost that appeal also, and now it is before the European Human Rights Commission in Europe. Time elapsed? Approximately four years. Guess who picks up the tab? So far I did - with the help of tireless friends and supporters. The German State already owes me huge sums of restitution!

That, I think, will be the way the Hans Schmidt trial will also play out - harassment all the way! and the infliction of indirect severe financial penalties before he is even convicted! - unless the mood of repression in Germany has drastically altered even that Kafkaesque scenario.

We can influence all this greatly by putting pressure on the German and American authorities by our mail, fax and phone campaigns by concentrating on the addresses given in this newsletter. You have no idea how important it is to let your voices be heard! Please understand that this is NOT about the Holocaust. This is about precedent-setting. This is about repressive measures to silence free thinkers and political dissidents that are now being locked in place by legal means - world-wide! - by using convenient targets like Hans Schmidt and other dissidents whom the public and tax payers are told and taught to hate and to convict so that "hate laws" can be ever more restrictive and draconian.

What must we learn?

But now some serious criticism of the initial campaign to get the "Free Hans Schmidt" campaign going. A few pointers as to what we need to do and what we need to avoid in future cases.