As many of you know, I came to the Revisionist struggle quite late, and I have always been jealous of the lucky participants around the Zundel-Haus in the 1985 and 1988 Great Holocaust Trials - the absolute highlight and outcome of which was the Leuchter Report.
How I would have loved to have been there - to chronicle and to report to my world-wide readership how history was made by a valiant and dedicated few! I always felt that the Leuchter segment itself deserved fair and impartial professional movie or documentary treatment. It was truly live drama at its best!
Well, guess what happened finally?
About six months or so ago I became aware that Ernst Zundel was repeatedly invited to participate in a documentary-in-preparation by a controversial Jewish film maker, Errol Morris. Usually, Ernst takes whatever media exposure he can get, even if it is negative. For some strange reason, this time he hesitated - I never really learned why. He changed his mind only after David Irving sent him a letter urging him to participate, and stating that both Leuchter and he, Irving, had already extensively been interviewed by Morris and been filmed in Boston. Irving stated that he felt this Jewish producer was open to the historical significance around the Leuchter Report and would give the event pretty fair treatment.
Ernst finally agreed and flew down to Boston to be interviewed and filmed for four-and-a-half hours straight. He called me afterwards and was "flying high", as he often does when he knows that he did exceptional media outreach work and "witnessed for the Cause", as he calls it.
He was favorably impressed with the producer and felt that the documentary could turn out to be an important beachhead for Revisionism - a break out of the Revisionist ghetto into a younger, yuppie crowd of documentary devotees and cinema enthusiasts.
And this is, indeed, what seems to have happened.
The latest New Yorker issue (which I haven't yet seen) is running a lengthy feature on this production, titled "The Friendly Executioner: How did an electric-hair repairman come to deny the Holocaust? And other odd questions" - an article that Ernst described to me as "köstlich" - which, awkwardly translated, means something like "delicious" or "scrumptious".
He said that he expects this documentary to be another link that will become a bridge between the dry science, cold statistics and all the collection of historical facts behind Revisionism and popular understanding. It will foster an ever-increasing suspicion beyond the dimly felt sense in the general population that there is obviously more to the "Holocaust" story than Hollywood has been willing to tell - until now.
I will run two segments on the background to this New Yorker feature and a third that summarizes the essence and significance of this documentary.
Spin back ten years - to January 18, 1988:
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On the anniversary of the founding of Bismarck's empire, the Second Great Holocaust Trial began against the German Ernst Zundel in Canada.
The press was well-represented.
Zundel had again prepared in-depth for this new trial. All the experiences gained in the 1985 trial now bore fruit. He and his team, the witnesses, attorneys, translators etc., were working round the clock. Everything ran like a well-oiled machine.
The "Toronto Star" had promised the Jewish delegates, who had visited the Star to ask for quasi-censorship, that it would print its Zundel court-reports always on the same place and page inside the newspaper, and that it would take the personal approval of one of the highest bosses of Toronto's largest daily to print an account of the Zundel trial elsewhere in the paper, much less on the front page.
The outcome of this decision was that the 66 articles printed in the Toronto Star about the 1988 Zundel Trial appeared on the same page and at the same place every day - easy for all the readers to find! It was as if the Zundel Team had its own column in the Star each day!
Once again Jewish censors had shot themselves in the foot!
The Jewish Defense League and its thugs were of course on duty again on the first court day of 1988, just as they had been during the 1985 Zundel Trial. Zundel's bodyguards were numerically stronger this time and soon had the situation under control. They steadily fought their way through to the entrance of the courthouse.
The Toronto Police was also better prepared than they had been in 1985, and after only a few minutes the ringleaders of the Jewish thugs were lying face-down in the slush on the sidewalk, while Toronto policemen knelt on them and held them down, clicking the steel handcuffs securely in place. The media couldn't have asked for anything better!
Their cameras clicked and whirred, and the none-too-pretty picture of the Jewish terrorists lying handcuffed on the ground soon appeared on TV screens and newspaper front pages throughout the country.
The result: prompt sentencing of the thugs; safety for Zundel and his friends on their way to the court, and orderly proceedings!
In the courtroom itself, Judge Thomas quickly hid behind the principle of "judicial notice", which is unique in Canadian court tradition but which occurs routinely in Revisionist trials in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
"Judicial notice" is a legal term and indicates that certain matters are not open to doubt - such as, for example, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, or that night follows day. This was to be the principle pertaining to the "Holocaust."
To apply such a legal principle in such a serious historical court case in Canada, where so many issues were disputed, violated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of freedom of speech and civil rights. Attorney Doug Christie had to fight with the Judge over every word and every sentence.
Christie was able to tone down the Judge's "judicial notice of the Holocaust"; unfortunately he could not prevent it entirely.
This was important: it meant that Zundel was not to be allowed to defend himself with all the facts at his disposal. The Judge forbade it.
The only question that remained was whether he was ". . . too dumb to understand the self-evident", or whether he acted ". . . with malicious intent against the Jews" when he dared to raise his questions about the "Holocaust"!
The bottom line: Zundel stood before the jury like one who was not quite "normal", or "right in the head", because according to the Judge's decree it was crystal clear that a "Holocaust" had happen and that any normal person must be able to grasp that! After all, the "self-evident" nature of the Holocaust could be shown and proven with hundreds of books, written by witnesses and historians and freely available in any library!
All this in 1988!
Lawyer Christie told Zundel that under these conditions, given Judge Thomas's "judicial notice", he could not possibly win the case for Zundel. He advised Zundel to restrict his defense to a minimum, not to waste his time and to save the money required for the enormous costs entailed in the defense. Christie kept beseeching Zundel: "Before this Judge, in this courtroom, in this court, the battle is hopeless! I can't win it for you!"
Zundel requested time to think it over. A few days later he called his team together, outlined the situation and told them: "We're going to go on! This time I am not fighting for myself. I'm fighting for the honor of my Fatherland. I want to have our extremely important witness testimony recorded in the Canadian court transcripts and the history books for all time."
The outcome was now a foregone conclusion - or so it was believed.
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The media pressure and the threats of violence against Zundel diminished markedly after the Judge has taken "judicial notice" of the Holocaust. The uniformed policemen, who to date had accompanied Zundel's every step, even in the courthouse and on his way to the washroom, now disappeared. Clearly even the uppermost echelons knew what a favor had been done on behalf of the Holocaust Lobby!
The latter triumphed openly, as though the ruling of "judicial notice" had already guaranteed the lie's victory over truth.
Zundel and Christie took hours-long walks through the snowy parks near the Zundel-Haus and discussed in detail all the possibilities that were still open to them.
Next on the discussion agenda were the specialists, witnesses and court experts who had come from all parts of the world to help. Zundel sounded out their attitudes, and in the end he himself set the course for the trial: in spite of his attorneys' and some of his foremost advisors' recommendations, he would see the trial through as planned - in-depth and as tough as it had been envisioned to start with.
He declared that it would be attorney Christie's task to block, to bypass, to ignore the Judge's "judicial notice", to hollow it out and to cut it down to size, bit by bit, with a kind of "policy of small steps", until in the end the Zundel Team would be able to demolish or at least invalidate the government's evidence.
The witnesses for the defense would attempt to have all their documents submitted and discussed in court, regardless of the outcome. In this way the Zundel Team dug down into the subject matter in a kind of judicial trench warfare - much like many battles were fought in the First and often in the Second World War!
It turned out to be a tough decision!
The Zundel-Haus became the Command Bunker extraordinaire, from where phone calls, fax letters and press releases were fired out into the world, daily and sometimes hourly. A second house was rented to accommodate the guests and the additional bodyguards, witnesses, lawyers, secretaries etc. Everywhere, important documents were analyzed, sorted, classified, and reproduced on five photocopiers, to be produced and submitted in court at the right time. The psychic energy was high; production was spectacular.
Soon everything was running smoothly.
In the course of the trial, cooks prepared almost 6,000 meals, which were eaten jointly in two large canteen-like dining rooms. Carpenters reconstructed "Auschwitz beds" exactly as per the design of the bunk beds of Auschwitz - and witnesses, advisers and typists slept right there in the building, crowded like sardines, in bunks stacked up to four high. This saved the defense a great deal of money, as a hotel room cost about $100 per night in Toronto's city centre.
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Inside the courtroom, day in, day out, Zundel's team of lawyers and advisors now revised and rewrote Germany's recent history - "judicial notice" or no "judicial notice"! The Crown attorney and the Judge could hardly believe their eyes and ears, clearly frustrated by the happenings.
Slice by slice and day by day, the old Holocaust version was dissected, scrutinized, debunked!
In the midst of the legal proceedings, electrifying news hits the Zundel-Haus much like a lightning bolt! The Warden of one of the largest American prisons, Bill Armontrout, who was to serve as Zundel-witness and to testify about gassings, suggested his expert, Fred Leuchter from Boston, as witness for the defense in questions pertaining to gas chambers!
Fred Leuchter, he said, was the man who was currently the only expert and consultant in the entire United States on matters of execution equipment, including electric chairs and gas chambers! Armontrout even had the address and telephone number of this potential expert witness on hand!
What a sensation! The legal team had not even known that such an expert existed!
Zundel reacted with lightning speed, even though he was already in the midst of the actual trial proceedings. Without hesitation he sent his foremost adviser, Professor Robert Faurisson, to Boston to check Leuchter out thoroughly.
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Tomorrow: Part II - Leuchter is dispatched to Auschwitz
Thought for the Day:
"Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
(Friedrich Nietzsche)