I just received this write-up from Paul Fromm, a personal
friend and on-location advisor of my husbands. Paul titled it "THE
JUDICIAL KIDNAPPING OF ERNST ZUNDEL IN TENNESSEE". Some of the
information is new even to me. It is a shocking document!
I will correct some misspellings but otherwise leave the
write-up intact. I urge all of you who have websites or access to
publications to spread it as far as you can!
Dear Paul,
You asked me to write something about what happened to me.
I find it difficult because I am in a state of denial about it all.
It simply has been one grotesquely unfair and very
emotionally disturbing, highly unpleasant experience from the word
"go", especially since we were living in the belief that we had
done everything by the book, everything we could have possibly been doing
and, and in our lawyer's opinion, the overwhelmed immigration service
checking into thousands, tens of thousands in fact, of terrorists in the
United States simply had not come around to look at the file of two
pension-aged Whites setting up residence.
All this came to an abrupt end when a virtual posse of
police cruisers, paddy wagons, etc., materialized in my driveway in
Tennessee at about 11:00 a.m., February 5, 2003.
One of my handymen was helping me frame some of my water
colors, oils and line drawings which I intended to hang on the walls of
our soon-to-be opened Art Gallery that very afternoon. We were to open in
two weeks.
I was dressed in my work outfit, blue jeans, mountain
hiking boots, colorful carpenter's suspenders, casual flannel shirt, etc.
I inquired what brought them there as they surrounded me menacingly. They
told me to put my hands on the hood on a truck in the driveway and said
that they were Immigration Service Enforcement officers there to address
me and take me into custody because I had failed to keep a hearing date. I
was stunned as was Ingrid (Rimland, my wife).
They had no arrest warrant. I asked to call my attorney.
The request was denied. Ingrid joined us. She, too, was told no calls to
the attorney were allowed. I asked Ingrid to go into the house for my
passport and jacket. I took no papers or identification like driver's
license, social security number, etc. and absolutely no addresses with me,
not to compromise my friends, because by then I knew I was being deported
- I thought to Germany.
Within minutes, I was in handcuffs and leg irons in a
prison van, escorted in a police convoy down our mountain road, past our
art gallery, into our little town where we did our shopping, onto highway
I-40 to Knoxville, where I was processed, finger printed, photographed and
where one Immigration officer, not directly involved in my case, had his
wall decorated with a 2 x 4-foot large Israeli flag. Needless to say, I
found this somewhat of an odd wall decoration in a U.S. Immigration
Office! I wondered to myself if they had Nazi swastika flags on the walls
of the INS in the 1930s or 1940s.
I was given some documents to sign which were lying on the
table of one of the bureaucrats when I came in. They had yellow post-it
notes and one clearly said in someone's handwriting "add today's date
here".
A Polaroid photo was taken of me against the wall of some
garage, part of a hollow block-type building with a very noisy,
malfunctioning air conditioner being checked by a technician. This photo
was then trimmed and later on stapled onto a document of which I was
given, I believe, a copy. The photo clearly shows the outfit I wore the
moment I was arrested.
I was then put again into a prison van in handcuffs and
leg irons and driven for approximately 1 1/4 to 1 ˝ hours through heavy
traffic from Knoxville via Maryville past the airport to the Blount County
Jail, a building I had pointed out to Ingrid several times in the previous
two years saying, "This is where they will take me when they come to
arrest me", prophetic words! How did I know? I don't know.
I was unloaded at the Blount County Jail, a cold
unfriendly place whose staff had a nasty attitude, the likes of which I
had never encountered in any other prison facility in Canada or in Europe
before.
The processing took over four hours. Then I finally was
allowed a brief call to Ingrid which did not go through right away as it
was 9:45 p.m. I was kept in an ice-cold, all concrete holding cell - even
the seats and floors were concrete - until well after midnight. I had had
nothing to eat or drink since about 12:30 at the INS office in Knoxville.
The medication I was on which I brought with me to jail was denied to me.
The doctor, I was told, was to decide if I was allowed it or not. Since
[the pills] were all non-chemical based, they were denied me. As a result,
my blood pressure began to act up. I was told by the nurses to whom I was
taken in handcuffs and ankle irons, that it was dangerously high.
I was housed in a two-man cell, 24-hour lockup, only
allowed a brief shower after two to three days and a short call to Ingrid,
I don't remember when.
My cell mate was a chemical engineer, a manic depressive
who hallucinated, talked to unseen people all day and jumped up and down
and out of bed all night long, hollering orders to persons unseen,
thinking he was in charge of the CIA and talking loudly to "the
president" on his make-believe telephone. He annoyed the guards
repeatedly in the middle of the night by frequently using the in-cell
intercom. He smelled something awful, obviously not having showered in
weeks.
Finally, the guards came en force, six or seven of them,
and told me to get off my top bunk, grab my mattress and sheets and get
out of the cell, motioning me out into the hallway. The next thing I heard
was hollering, screaming and kicking and punching and blood squirting
against the wall as my crazy cell mate was dragged on one leg across the
floor into a different area of the prison. I saw him a few days later on
my way to sick bay with bruises, all black and blue over his eyes and head
as they led him past me from the doctor's office.
Later on, I was told by my U.S. attorney that he had
engaged a well-known Knoxville attorney (Public Defender) who had filed a
$6 million lawsuit against the Blount County Jail and the sheriffs and
guards.
I was put into a two-man cell with a gentle, soft-spoken
65-year-old barber who had tried to shoot his mother. He was kind and
helpful to me and taught me the ropes of U.S. prison life. I was now
briefly with the general population, half Black, Mexican and Indian, the
rest being Whites mainly from the Smoky Mountain area. There was hardly a
blond person amongst them, all were dark-haired to jet black. Most were
hardened criminals, murderers, bank robbers, car thieves. Most were repeat
offenders. Many had 25- to 30-year sentences. There was anger, rage and
frustration in that place that was palpable. Guards were cold, abrupt and
unfriendly.
Contact with Ingrid [my wife] was very unpredictable
because one of the phones was broken and the young Black inmates were
hogging the phones for calls of 45 minutes to an hour.
One Sunday, I heard dogs barking. The next thing I saw, we
were all ordered into our cells while black-uniformed SWAT teams went
systematically from cell to cell, threw us on the floor face down, hand
cuffed, arms twisted behind our back. They searched our pockets, beds and
plastic bins. They dragged us outside the cells like sacks of potatoes
while helmeted, visored, New World Order-type cops hollered commands at
us. The dogs dripping saliva from their snapping jaws were mainly
Dobermans and German Shepherds and were kept on chain leashes two feet
away from our bodies and faces.
Young, pretty women in skin-tight uniforms and
tightly-fitting flak jackets, all black in color, kept climbing over the
men who were curled up, face down, shaking, crying, tears streaming down
some of their faces, frightened out of their wits. The women filmed these
hapless prisoners with mini camcorders close up, laughing and joking,
having themselves a ball. For whom were these videos taken?
During this amazing performance, the water in the toilets
was turned off and after we were ordered back into our cells, many felt
the urge to poop and soon, and the place stank to high Heaven! After about
two hours, the water was turned on and everything returned to normal.
I was there on two weekends, and this terrorizing of the
prisoners happened on both weekends. I was lucky to miss it the last
weekend because my American attorney had come to see me and I was in the
visitor meeting area of the prison. He had found out by the grapevine that
I was going to be deported from the USA, even though we had a habeas
corpus motion filed with the court and it was already before the
Cincinnati Sixth Circuit Court at that time.
A few nights later, I was awakened by pounding on my cell
door at 2:30 a.m. and told to get ready. By 4:30 a.m., the guards finally
came to get me for "processing" out. I was given a shower, ice
cold, and changed back into my civilian clothing. It was a national
holiday, "President's Day" [Monday, February 17]. They could not
let me have the U.S. $400 I had brought with me to prison because of the
holiday. Thus, I was taken to the Knoxville Airport without a single cent
in my pocket. We boarded a plane to Atlanta [Georgia] shortly after 7:00
a.m., landing there after 9:00 a.m. I was not told where they were
deporting me to but saw the airline counter we went to, and it said,
"Buffalo, New York". Then, I realized they were shipping me to
Canada, not to Germany.
I had had no opportunity to let Ingrid know where I was
and what was happening to me. We arrived in Buffalo at 11:30 a.m. in a bad
snowstorm. There I was told I was banned from the U.S. two times ten
years, which meant Ingrid would be 87, and I would be 84 years-old before
I might have my first chance to see her again.
I was taken across the Canadian border, kept in a locked
room, at Canadian Immigration offices at the Peace Bridge. There was lots
of gesticulation and loud talking. The end result was I was taken back
across the U.S. border, still in a snowstorm. We seemed to slide and
slither for hours until I finally spotted a sign saying Attica, New York,
Maximum Security Prison. Luckily, the van turned into Batavia and we
finally arrived there at dusk. It was way out in a wind-blown farming
area. It was a flat-roofed facility, surrounded by high barbed-wire fences
and search lights with a small guard hut and a barrier like in the Dr.
Zhivago film.
A huge six-foot guard, dressed in a Russian-type fur hat
and a dark green greatcoat, came to check papers and cargo, and soon I was
processed into the Batavia Detention Center. It was a seemingly new, very
clean, well-organized facility. Especially the Immigration Detention area
I was kept in was state of the art, efficient and clean. The guards were
friendly. There were a dozen phones on the wall, a pencil sharpener which
worked and paper and envelopes cheerfully handed to me by a big, blond
guard who could have stepped out of an SS recruiting poster a few moments
before.
Unfortunately, I was only there for not quite two days
before I was taken back to Canada, this time for good. Again, I was
deported via the Peace Bridge at Fort Erie on February 19, 2003.
I was interrogated for about seven or eight hours off and
on. I was allowed to call Ingrid, my lawyer, friends, and within two
hours, some Scottish friends [from Hamilton, Ontario] had come to see me,
and brought me some much-needed money. They left. I was arrested and taken
to Thorold, the Niagara Region Detention Center. It was an old facility
and primitive in comparison to Batavia.
This was to be my home away from home for the next three
months, interrupted by numerous detention hearings...
