Ernst Zündel - The Great Holocaust Trial

Michael A. Hoffman II documentary film on the thought-crime show-trial of Ernst Zundel, prosecuted in Toronto criminal court for publishing the pamphlet, "Did Six Million Really Die?"

This video, which was edited from more than 100 hours of establishment TV newscasts about the trial, is regarded as one of the most eye-opening films ever made about the struggle by dissidents and researchers for the right to question official history.

In 1985 Zundel was a German immigrant residing in Toronto, Canada where he had built a highly successful advertising and graphic arts business based in a rambling Victorian mansion in the bohemian "Cabbagetown" section of metropolitan Toronto.

Zundel viewed the "Six million" story as a form of mental genocide against the German people; ostensibly a noble tale of the epoch struggle for human rights that in actuality was a form of devious hate propaganda, leveling every conceivable blood libel at the Germans and branding them with the Mark of Cain. Having survived the Allied firebombing of his native city of Pforzheim as a child, Zundel was well familiar with the war crimes of the hypocritical Allies and he made it his life's work to clear the name of his own people.

For this commendable enterprise, Zundel had his mailing privileges revoked by the Canadian government in 1983, forcing him to open a post office box in Buffalo, New York and send a messenger to commute hundreds of miles just to receive mail. In 1985 he was charged under an archaic "False News" provision of an old Edwardian municipal code, for having published the pamphlet "Did Six Million Really Die?" He faced two years in prison if convicted.

In reponse Zundel put the so-called "Holocaust" itself on trial, hiring a little-known maverick lawyer from British Columbia, Douglas Christie, to argue his case before Judge Hugh Locke. Seated next to Christie was the learned revisionist historian Prof. Robert Faurisson of France, who guided Christie's withering cross-examination of a long train of "saintly 'Holocaust' survivors" offered by the "Crown."

Zundel's defense was initially regarded by the press and public as preposterous. "How can anyone deny the 'Holocaust?" was the incredulous response to the news that Zundel would vigorously defend himself and the free speech rights of all Canadians. The trial was expected to be a quick and ignominious rout of Zundel and his motley crew.

How wrong the odds-makers were! For the first time in history the holy "survivors" finally had to submit their "testimony" to scrutiny, to the rules of evidence and cross-examination, something that has never happened before or since. Seated in the press gallery, I watched as my colleagues of the fourth estate grew ever more surprised and shocked at the amazing admissions Christie and Faurisson elicited from the "eyewitnesses" to the gas chambers. TV reporters like Claud Adams and journalists from the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail produced footage and headlines that turned Canada upside down.

Canadian readers and viewers learned that there was no scientific evidence for homicidal gas chambers, that homicidal gassings (as opposed to the German use of Zyklon B as a life-saving prophylactic against the deadly typhus louse), were a rumor that the inmates heard but never actually witnessed for themselves--these were statements obtained by Mr. Christie from the prosecution's own vaunted Auschwitz eyewitnesses!

In March of 1985 Zundel was convicted by a cowardly jury that had followed the prejudicial advisories of a bent judge; but the conviction was reversed on appeal and Zundel went to trial again in 1988, eventually winning a Supreme Court decision for free speech in Canada.

The 1988 trial is more well known in revisionist circles. Zundel was famous by then and the appearance of Fred "Dr. Death" Leuchter, the designer of the US Prison system's execution apparatus, as an expert defense witness who tested purported execution "gas chambers" on-site in Auschwitz, Poland and determined they had never been used to kill anyone, created an international sensation.

62 Min.