Holocaust denier gets jail

A German Holocaust denier was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for anti-Jewish incitement and Holocaust denial. The State Court in Mannheim announced the verdict Thursday against Germar Rudolf, 42. Rudolf, a chemist by training, had tried both to deny and relativize the Nazi genocide against European Jewry, on the Internet and in a pseudo-scientific book. Rudolf continued in this vein at the start of his trial in November 2006, describing the Holocaust as a “gigantic con.”Rudolf published an “expert opinion” in 1991 that the poison gas Zyklon B was never used at Auschwitz. He was convicted in Baden-Württemberg in 1995 on charges of slander and incitement to hatred, and sentenced to 14 months in jail. He fled to the United States to avoid serving his German prison sentence. After being deported from the United States in November 2005, Rudolf was arrested on arrival at Frankfurt airport and began serving that sentence.