Ernst Zundel was the principal organiser and publisher of Holocaust denial in the English-speaking world from the late 1970s until his death in 2017. He produced the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?, ran the Toronto-based publishing operation Samisdat, and stood trial twice in Canada under the country’s “false news” statute. His 1988 trial produced one of the most consequential pieces of denier output of the late twentieth century: the Leuchter Report.
The early career
Zundel was born in 1939 in Wildbad in the Black Forest, in what was then Württemberg in Nazi Germany. He emigrated to Canada in 1958 at the age of nineteen and settled in Toronto. He worked as a graphic designer through the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1970s he was running Samisdat Publishers from a fortified house on Carlton Street in downtown Toronto, producing denier pamphlets, audio cassettes, and the printed editions of Richard Verrall’s Did Six Million Really Die? for North American distribution.
Verrall, the deputy editor of the British National Front’s Spearhead magazine, had published the pamphlet under the pseudonym “Richard Harwood” in 1974. Zundel was its principal North American distributor and publisher. The pamphlet’s central claims were that the Holocaust had not happened, that the six million figure was a Zionist invention, and that the witness testimony was unreliable. It became the most widely circulated single denier text of the 1970s and 1980s.
The 1985 trial
Sabina Citron, an Auschwitz survivor and the founder of the Holocaust Remembrance Association, laid a private criminal complaint against Zundel in 1983 for distributing Did Six Million Really Die?. The Crown took up the prosecution under section 181 of the Canadian Criminal Code, the “false news” statute, which made it an offence to publish material the publisher knew to be false and that was likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest.
The trial opened in Toronto in January 1985. The Crown took the unusual decision to call expert historical evidence to establish the basic historical facts of the Holocaust against Zundel’s claims. Raul Hilberg, the doyen of American Holocaust historians and author of The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), gave evidence over several days. Survivors including Rudolf Vrba (the co-author of the 1944 Vrba-Wetzler report on Auschwitz) gave evidence. Zundel was convicted and sentenced to fifteen months. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1987 on procedural grounds (the trial judge had taken judicial notice of the Holocaust as historical fact, which the Court of Appeal held was procedurally improper).
The 1988 trial and the Leuchter Report
The Crown retried Zundel in 1988. The defence team, led by Douglas Christie, hired the American execution-equipment designer Fred Leuchter to travel to Auschwitz and assess the gas chamber buildings. Leuchter’s brief was to provide expert testimony that the buildings could not have functioned as homicidal gas chambers. He had no qualifications in chemistry, in toxicology, in cyanide chemistry, in architecture, in archaeology, or in the operation of execution facilities. He had a high-school education and a contract from the State of Missouri to maintain electric chairs.
Leuchter visited Auschwitz with Robert Faurisson in February 1988. He chipped samples of plaster and brick from the walls of Crematorium II and from the delousing chamber at Birkenau. He sent the samples to Alpha Analytical Laboratories in Massachusetts for chemical testing. He drafted a report. The report claimed that the cyanide residues in the homicidal-gas-chamber walls were too low for the spaces to have been used for homicidal gassing.
The methodology was defective. Leuchter had not corrected for the differential exposure of the two kinds of chamber (the homicidal chambers had been used briefly with high concentrations and then ventilated; the delousing chambers had been used continuously for years with lower concentrations and longer dwell times, producing the prussian-blue staining that any visitor can still see). He had not taken samples that distinguished the original wall surface from post-war erosion. The corrective testing by the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków in 1990, the Markiewicz, Gubała and Łabędź report, established the correct chemistry. The Leuchter findings were a methodological artefact.
None of this was visible at the 1988 trial. Leuchter testified for the defence. Justice Ron Thomas excluded most of his expert testimony on the grounds that he had no qualifications, but allowed limited factual evidence on his Auschwitz visit. Zundel was convicted again. The conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1992, this time on the substantive ground that section 181 of the Criminal Code was unconstitutional under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Leuchter Report nonetheless escaped from the trial. Zundel published it through Samisdat. David Irving wrote the foreword to the British edition in 1989. It became the most cited denier-engineering text of the next twenty years, despite having been forensically dismantled before it was published.
Deportation and the German prison sentence
Zundel’s Canadian denial activity continued through the 1990s. He was denied Canadian citizenship in 1994 and 1995. He moved to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, in 2001 and was deported back to Canada in 2003 as an illegal immigrant. The Canadian authorities held him in detention for two years on a national-security certificate (the case was the subject of the Federal Court ruling in Re Zundel, 2005 FC 295) and deported him to Germany in March 2005.
He was arrested at Frankfurt airport on landing. The German federal prosecutor charged him under section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch (the Volksverhetzung statute, criminalising incitement of hatred and the denial of Nazi crimes) for the contents of his Samisdat website, which had been operated from Tennessee but had been accessible in Germany. He was tried in Mannheim from November 2005 to February 2007 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the maximum available under the statute. He served the full sentence in JVA Mannheim and was released in March 2010. He retired to Bad Wildbad, his birthplace, and died there in August 2017.
Afterwards
Zundel’s significance to Holocaust denial was organisational rather than intellectual. He had no historical training and made no original arguments. What he did was build a publishing infrastructure: Samisdat operated for over thirty years and pumped denier material into the Anglophone market in volumes no other operation matched. The Leuchter Report came out of his courtroom defence and became the engineering text of the denial movement for two decades. His 1985 and 1988 trials, intended as Crown prosecutions of denier publishing, became platforms on which Zundel’s lawyers cross-examined Holocaust survivors at length, an experience that shaped the survivor community’s view of “false news” prosecutions for the rest of the period.
He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.
See also
- The Leuchter Report Proved No Gas Chambers
- Raul Hilberg
- Robert Faurisson
- David Irving
- The Six Million Figure is an Exaggeration
Sources
- Justice Ron Thomas, charge to the jury and rulings, R. v. Zundel, Ontario Supreme Court, 1988, transcript held at the Canadian Jewish Congress archive
- R. v. Zundel, Supreme Court of Canada, [1992] 2 SCR 731, the constitutional challenge that struck down section 181 of the Criminal Code
- Re Zundel, Federal Court of Canada, 2005 FC 295, the security-certificate proceeding
- Mannheim Landgericht, judgment of 15 February 2007, conviction under section 130 StGB
- Raul Hilberg, expert witness testimony at the 1985 Zundel trial, in The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Ivan R. Dee, 1996, ch. 13
- Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, The Auschwitz Protocols (1944), reprinted in Vrba, I Cannot Forgive, Bantam, 1964
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993, particularly ch. 8 on the Leuchter Report
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002, ch. 3 to 5
- Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubała and Jerzy Łabędź, “A Study of the Cyanide Compounds Content in the Walls of the Gas Chambers in the Former Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps”, Z Zagadnień Sądowych (Problems of Forensic Sciences), Institute of Forensic Research, Kraków, 1994
- Manuel Prutschi, “The Zundel Affair”, in Antisemitism in Canada: History and Interpretation, ed. Alan Davies, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Combating Holocaust Denial”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org