Neo-nazi propagandist Ernst Zundel, who published a booklet denying that the Holocaust occurred, was found guilty Wednesday in district court of knowingly spreading false news.
The jury of six men and five women deliberated for 17 hours before handing down its verdict, after a trial that lasted nearly four months and took up 14,000 pages of typescript.
A twelfth juror was dismissed earlier in the trial.
Zundel could receive up to two years for the crime and, as a West German citizen, may face deportation after serving the sentence. District court Judge Ron Thomas is expected to announce the sentence Friday.
Zundel’s conviction was his second under a 90-year-old Canadian statute that makes illegal the dissemination of information known to be false and likely to foment social and racial intolerance. But the earlier conviction and a 15-month prison sentence were overturned in 1985 on a technicality, and a new trial was ordered.
Zundel is the publisher of a 20-year-old pamphlet by a British fascist. Titled “Did Six million Really Die?” the pamphlet argues that as few as 300,000 Jews actually died during World War II, that there was no official genocide policy in Hitler’s Germany and that the gas chambers are a fiction.
Jewish leaders here welcomed the verdict. Rose Wolfe and Charles Zaionz, community relations chairman and regional chairman, respectively, of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said in a joint statement: “Once and for all Holocaust denial is placed outside the social norm, where it belongs. The conviction of Zundel demonstrates that Canadians will not permit vilification of ethno-cultural minorities.”
Helen Smolack, on behalf of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, which laid the charge, said simply, “The system works.”
Speaking to reporters after the verdict, Zundel denied that he had received a fair trial. “This is a result of 40 years of brainwashing” by a “media barrage” that includes such television shows as “Hogan’s Heroes” and “The Rat Pack,” he said. He will appeal the verdict.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
