Ernst Zündel

Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel (24 April 1939 – 5 August 2017) was a German neo-Nazi publisher and pamphleteer of Holocaust denial literature.

He was jailed several times: in Canada for publishing literature "likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group", and on charges of being a threat to national security; in the United States, for overstaying his visa; and in Germany for charges of "inciting racial hatred".

Zündel was born in Calmbach (now part of Bad Wildbad) in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in 1939 and was raised mostly by his mother, Gertrude.

His father, Fritz, a lumberjack, was drafted into the German Army shortly after Ernst's birth and served as a medic on the Eastern Front.

His father was captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war and did not return home until 1947, by which time he had become an alcoholic.

Ernst was the fourth in a family of six children consisting of a brother, who later became a lawyer in the United States, and four sisters.

He studied graphic art at trade school, graduating in 1957 and emigrated to Canada in 1958, when he was 19, to avoid conscription by the German military.

He lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000.

In 1960, he married French-Canadian Janick Larouche, whom he met in a language class in Toronto, and with whom he had sons Pierre and Hans.

On several occasions in the 1960s he was commissioned to illustrate covers for Maclean's magazine.

His controversial views were not well known in the 1960s and 1970s, since he published his opinions under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.

At the time, he was also an organizer among immigrants for the Ralliement des créditistes, Quebec's Social Credit party.

The couple moved to Montreal in 1961, where Zündel would eventually come under the tutelage of Canadian fascist politician Adrien Arcand.

Professionally, Zündel worked as a graphic artist, photographer, photo retoucher, and printer.

He got his first job in the art department at Simpson-Sears in Toronto before opening his own art studio in Montreal.

In 1968, he joined the Liberal Party of Canada and ran in that year's Liberal leadership convention under the anglicized name Ernest Zundel as a self-described "nuisance candidate", running on an "immigrant rights" platform.

He used his candidacy to campaign against anti-German attitudes.

He dropped out of the contest prior to the election, but not before delivering his campaign speech to the convention.

Under his Friedrich pseudonym, he wrote a preface to Savitri Devi's Nazi-Esoteric book The Lightning and the Sun.

In 1969, he moved back to Toronto, where he founded Great Ideas Advertising, a commercial art studio.

Zündel gained prominence during the 1970s as spokesman for Concerned Parents of German Descent, a group that claimed German-Canadians and their children were the target of discrimination due to anti-German stereotyping in the media.

In the late 1970s, Zündel, as the group's spokesman, issued press releases protesting the NBC Holocaust miniseries for its depiction of Germans.

In the late 1970s, reporter Mark Bonokoski unmasked Zündel and ended his career as a credible media spokesperson by revealing that he was publishing neo-Nazi and antisemitic pamphlets such as The Hitler We Loved and Why under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.

In 1977, Zündel founded a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers, which issued such neo-Nazi pamphlets as his co-authored The Hitler We Loved and Why and Richard Verrall's Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last, which were both significant documents to the Holocaust denial movement.

Verrall's pamphlet should not be confused with Barbara Kulaszka's book ''Did Six Million Really Die?

By the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers had grown into a worldwide distributor of Nazi and neo-Nazi posters, audiotapes, and memorabilia, as well as pamphlets and books devoted to Holocaust denial and what he claimed were Allied and Israeli war crimes.

Report on the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1988''.

Once the certificate was upheld, he was deported to Germany and tried in the state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement of Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s.

In 1994, Zündel campaigned in Canada to ban the movie Schindler's List as "hate speech" and celebrated the movie being banned in Malaysia and effectively banned in Lebanon and Jordan.

On 8 May 1995, his Toronto residence was the target of an arson attack, resulting in $400,000 in damage.

A group calling itself the "Jewish Armed Resistance Movement" claimed responsibility for the arson attack; according to the Toronto Sun, the group had ties to extremist organizations, including the Jewish Defense League and Kahane Chai.

The leader of the Toronto wing of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Weinstein (known then as Meir Halevi), denied involvement in the attack; however, five days later, Weinstein and American JDL leader Irv Rubin were caught trying to break into the Zündel property, where they were apprehended by police.

No charges were ever filed in the incident.

Weeks after the fire, Zündel was targeted with a parcel bomb that was detonated by the Toronto Police bomb squad.

The investigation into the parcel bomb attack led to charges being laid against David Barbarash, an animal rights activist based in British Columbia, but they were eventually stayed.

His publishing company, Samisdat Publishers, disseminated neo-Nazi literature, including Zündel's The Hitler We Loved and Why, Richard Verrall's Did Six Million Really Die?, and works by Malcolm Ross.

On 5 February 2003, Ernst Zündel was detained by local police in the U.S. and deported to Canada, where he was detained for two years on a security certificate for being a foreign national considered a threat to national security pending a court decision on the validity of the certificate.

On February 15, 2007, he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison.

All these imprisonments and prosecutions were for inciting hatred against an identifiable group.

He was released on March 1, 2010.