Classic EssaysKevin Alfred Strom

Terror versus Truth in Canada

zundelAn Interview With Ernst Zündel

by Kevin Alfred Strom (1995)

ON THE FRONT LINES in the war to save our people is where you will find German-Canadian free speech advocate and revisionist author and publisher Mr. Ernst Zündel (pictured) of Toronto. Mr. Zündel in recent weeks has very nearly become a martyr for his beliefs, being the victim of an arson attack which severely damaged his home and which surely would have killed him had he been at home as usual, and then the victim of a mail bomb cleverly disguised as a book and which he had the good sense to turn over to police when he became suspicious because of its weight. The controlled media, which are ever so vigilant to protect the rights of minorities and leftists and raise a hue and cry from coast to coast when one of their pets gets a scratch or a bruise or has his feelings hurt, have uttered hardly a peep at these and many other vicious attacks against Mr. Zündel.

My questions will be in bold style formatting, Mr. Zündel’s answers will be in normal style formatting.

Welcome to American Dissident Voices. It is an honor to have such a brave champion of free speech as a guest. There are few people in this world who would be willing to struggle and fight for what they believe to be true as you have. In recent weeks you have been the victim of an arson attack and a mail bomb. There must be those who passionately hate you and what you are doing.

Well, the hate campaign has actually been of a much longer duration than just recent weeks. It has never taken as violent a form, except we had one bomb go off in 1984, but then things died down because the people that were my opposite numbers, usually the “holocaust” promotion lobby, were able to drag me into a Canadian court and keep me in there, tied up in litigation, for nine years after that. While I was in court the violence was by JDL [“Jewish Defense League”] demonstrators that knocked me to the ground, and who tried to attack my legal team as they went into court, and beat some of my witnesses on the way to court, and so on. But generally we had very good police protection, and when I found that the police protection wasn’t swift enough or adequate, I organized my own.

So there has been an ongoing campaign of violence against you for over a decade.

Oh, yes. To me this is just an escalation. The reason why I have survived as long as I have survived is what my friends, comrades and supporters thought was an extraordinarily cautious approach. I wore bulletproof vests, and my bodyguards had the option of having bulletproof vests — I bought five sets. I had former policemen and active policemen who were on holiday as my security advisors. I had searchlights on my building that came on with sensors. We have spent a lot of money on time-lapse recorders, and that paid off in this particular arson attack because we actually filmed the arsonist in the process of pouring 20 liters of gasoline, which is about five gallons, on the wall on the front of my building. Unfortunately, there was only one person in the building at the time, and they were in a back room and didn’t see that monitor at the moment. Our cameras have also paid off in that we have trapped numerous people that heaved objects or who tried to pull signs down from our building. You have to understand that we are located on one of the most busy thoroughfares in Toronto. We have bylaws, like all large cities, which only allow you to erect fences up to a certain point. The city forced us a few months ago to take a security fence down by two feet. We cannot put barbed wire around, naturally, because this is a residential and business zoned area. There is, of course, a certain amount of protection from being within the center of the city, because there are always people about. This is how it came about that a person saw the arsonist actually walking along the street, carrying his can of gasoline, and the police got an excellent description. So, between our security video and the man’s description I have every confidence that, with the help of my $5,000 cash reward, we will apprehend that man and that man will be brought to trial. Through him, we will find out who paid him to do the job.

When did this arson attack occur and how much damage was there?

It was 5 a.m. on the seventh of May, and some people have said that it was deliberately designed with the VE-Day celebrations in mind. As a matter of fact, I was in Western Canada, in British Columbia, at the time to meet with my long-standing attorney Douglas Christie to talk about legal moves against public officials and some of these Marxists and Jewish agitators that were saying they were going to drive me out of the neighborhood. They had established a committee to drive me out of the neighborhood where I live and carry on a lawful business where I think and write and speak — which is constitutionally protected even in Canada. We were going to make moves under the criminal code of Canada, but it never came to that because the morning news was that my house had been torched. Unfortunately, my own private, really priceless library suffered almost total loss. Some of these books were three or four hundred years old. Many of them were bequeathed to me by older Europeans for my work. The unfortunate thing is, for the contents of the building I could not get any insurance anywhere in Canada. Once you are a victim of a bombing, you enter a risk group to which they will not sell insurance.

That is a tragedy. It could have been worse, though: people might have been killed.

Oh, yes. Had I been in Toronto, I would certainly have been killed in this attack. In the room where I normally sleep, the flames and the smoke and the soot is such that the gases would have killed me.

Now you have also been the victim of attempted murder via mail bomb.

Yes. That’s another kind of an odd situation, in that the bomb that was mailed came in the guise of a parcel, and the parcel looked like any other book. When we felt it, it was unduly heavy. There was a cover on it; there was a curved spine on it; and it certainly was a book. But I compared other books with it on our scale and realized that even with the heaviest paper it would require a much larger volume than this parcel had to be the same weight. Either somebody was sending me gold bricks or something worse.

I had a fortunate phone call from Vancouver from a long-time acquaintance and political collaborator of mine. When we told him the P.O. box number on the parcel he said, “Well, heck, that’s my P.O. box number!” I was shocked. I had seen the man two weeks ago. He had never said he was going to send me a parcel. It was a two year old P.O. box number.

So I went to the police. I took the bomb in my car, drove down to the police station, and got promptly chewed out by the police people. They said one shouldn’t drive around the city carrying bombs in the trunk of a car.

Yes [laughter].

I didn’t know it was a bomb at that time, I just suspected it to be one. And besides, I’m so in Dutch with my neighbors here that I thought that was better than getting them all upset with what might be a fake bomb scare where they’d have to clear out the whole neighborhood. If it was a fake I’d look ridiculous, so I didn’t call anybody from the media. I figured since we’d had it in my office for almost a week, and had handled it, that if it was a bomb it was of a kind that would not explode unless one opened it. The bomb squad in Toronto deduced exactly the same thing after they handled it and x-rayed it. So I wasn’t so stupid after all. I had deposited it in an empty area of the parking lot of the police station. Then the bomb squad did its thing with the robot. They put it in an explosion-proof container, and drove it off into an uninhabited area and exploded it.

Are you ever worried that your nine lives are going to run out some day?

[Laughter] Well, I think I have six or seven left!

The really interesting thing is that after the police and bomb experts were through examining it, they stated that it was a very powerful pipe bomb that would have killed anybody within 90 meters of the blast. In American measurement, that’s about 300 feet. And I live in a very densely populated area, as I said in the downtown Toronto area on a main thoroughfare. If that thing had gone off in this building it might have leveled the block.

Are there any leads or suspects?

For the bombing, not really; it’s too early in the investigation.

The interesting thing is that on the 13th of April, I had been sent, from a Vancouver address, an envelope containing a mousetrap to which were attached some very sharp blades. In it was a threatening letter that said it was from the “Anti-Fascist Militia.” They said that this was a declaration of war and that this was only the first device and that the next one may well be “boom.” That is how the letter ended.

Over the years, when you have a high profile, you get threatening letters and you get lots of threatening phone calls. I got a little more concerned since this organization was founded to drive me out of the neighborhood, and thousands of posters were distributed all around Toronto with instructions on them for how to build a Molotov cocktail, meaning a fire-bomb, an arson bomb, along with a picture of my face in the crosshairs of a rifle, and my address. The headline on the poster was “Bored?”, then the Molotov cocktail, then my house and address and my face. I turned all these things over to the authorities, I mailed them in press releases to the Canadian media, I made them available to the intelligence agencies that look after security in this country. I did what every citizen ought to do, plus I really fortified my building to the point where some people referred to it as a “bunker,” which it was not. It was just a very secure building. But even if you are on a main drag, you are not immune to arson.

Have the authorities vigorously pursued these cases?

You know, many people have called me, friends from the nationalist camp, revisionists and so on, from around the world, have called me over the years — and now again because of what happened — and they are all very cynical about the police and the authorities. I’d have to say that in my case — and I don’t say this because I expect favors from the Toronto police, I’m just saying it because it’s a fact — the Toronto police department has been the one organization in my tremendously difficult and protracted struggle against the Zionist “holocaust” promotion lobby that has shown professionalism and a detached method of dealing with me. They have accorded me my constitutional rights, and that is to their credit because the media hate campaign against me has been so intense and so vicious that it’s a miracle that the police have taken such a professional approach. I am convinced that if there are fingerprints on any of these devices, if there are leads that my $5,000 reward poster will bring, the police will vigorously pursue these people.

Now the next question is: Will the courts, will the prosecutors vigorously prosecute this case? I don’t think so.

What makes you feel that way?

Because the police did arrest eight people outside my building after a recent violent demonstration. You have to understand, we’ve had demonstrations in my neighborhood that were supposed to go outside my building of up to three and four thousand people. The last one was only about 250 people. It was quite violent. The people who were demonstrating were followed by the police, and eight of them were arrested for threatening policemen with two-by-fours, causing mischief, and throwing objects at the police. The police were quite prepared for firebugs, because I saw a special unit with four different policemen carrying fire extinguishers during the demonstration, which is highly unusual. So the police are not the problem.

The problem was that the lady prosecutor in Toronto did such a non- prosecution — such a poorly prepared prosecution — that she didn’t submit the color video tapes we had showing the camouflaged faces of these terrorist demonstrators, where we had zoomed in on people who were throwing objects, showing others who were threatening police with two- by-four beams, and so on. None of this was introduced into evidence.

The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge’s chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists. He treated me like a piece of dung, and let all of these eight people go.

The police did the right thing — they protected private property, they protected my constitutional right to speak, they brought these people to justice, they arrested them, they charged them properly, and then everything fell apart. If I was a leftist Marxist demonstrator bent on making life difficult for a man like Ernst Zündel, I would take this as official encouragement.

Indeed. It seems to me that the media are culpable as well. In this country, we’ve heard virtually nothing of what’s happened to you.

In Toronto, the people that really “lit the fuse” were the mainstream media. They have engaged in a hate campaign, in a shameful and shameless way — especially since the 50th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Second World War. Also guilty, I think, are the people who put up posters outside my house claiming that it was to celebrate VE-Day that they torched my house. You cannot stoke the fires of prejudice against German people and then not find that somewhere, sometime down the road it doesn’t discharge. And that’s what has happened. They agitated and agitated and agitated, until finally they found an unbalanced enough person and they put the torch to my house.

The organized Jewish and leftist groups want to shut you up and stifle debate on the subject of what really happened to the Jewish people during World War II. But by putting you on trial ten years ago, they created the biggest public debate on the subject that the world has ever seen.

Yes. They basically scored what we call in German an eigentor, they scored a goal against themselves. Their hatred finally turned against themselves. The trial of Ernst Zündel has gone down in Canadian history. We have struck down, through my trial, one of the most pernicious laws — a law that could get writers and broadcasters into conflict with the law very easily. The Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, and we defined in the process our new bill of rights, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in a way that is almost American. In other words, they’re leaning very heavily on the American model. I have only been able to do my own broadcasts and my own TV and public access shows because of this Supreme Court definition and victory. So it’s true: they pursued me for nine years in the courts; and in the end, evil produced good.

You’ve recently published a huge, 564-page book detailing your trial and it is full of magnificent documentation of the evidence that was brought to bear there.

It was compiled by my attorney, Barbara Kulaszka, and is titled Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel. It is a condensation of 12,700 pages of trial transcripts into a readable form. It really is, as one of the leading professors in Europe called it, an encyclopedia of the “holocaust,” because both sides are presented. The prosecution witnesses, including Dr. Hilberg from the United States who is known as the “pope of the `holocaust’,” Christopher Browning, his disciple, and others are cross-examined in a court. What we’re looking at here is not just a book, it is testimony given under oath and verified by cross- examination. People don’t have to go and buy trashy pro-“holocaust” or even smaller anti-“holocaust” books. It’s all in one book: the “holocaust” as a historical event, or non-event has been solved. It has been explained in detail in a courtroom in Toronto.

What we have to do now is to make the public at large aware that what we’re looking at is not a historical event but — and I have to be brutal and I am going to say it — a racket. It is a racket which defrauds nations. The German nation was its first and principal victim, to the tune of 100 billion Deutsche marks plus. There were times when the state of Israel got up to 40 or 41 per cent of its budget, directly or indirectly from these “reparations” — money the German people paid for propaganda. For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations. The German people have been defrauded out of 100 billion Deutsche marks. It’s a racket. It is not a historical event.

I am not against Jewish people, or any other person, who unlawfully, illegally, or immorally was deprived of his freedom in the Second World War getting restitution. Or if there were Jewish business people in Germany that had their businesses seized, they should be restituted properly. The German nation is magnanimous even in defeat, and they have a sense of justice and they certainly want to repair damage that was done unjustly. I am totally in favor of that. But not to let generations of German people to be defrauded, and then to be vilified by films like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.

You call yourself a revisionist.

Yes I do.

Now that term has been sullied by the media. The media try to give the impression that revisionists are part of some sort of sinister movement to “revise” history à la George Orwell’s 1984. But it is really quite the opposite. Can you explain why you call yourselves revisionists?

It is a very good point that you are touching on here. American people, French people, English people, even Jewish revisionists like David Cole and the man who was a witness for me, Joseph Burg, and the French [Jewish] Professor Dommergue: these are people that merely want to look at history, bring it into accord with the facts, meaning historical documents and events; strip it of rhetoric and propaganda; and then basically write a factual history.

But as a German — and I am German-born — we Germans are condemned once again to be radical revisionists. Because, you see, we lost our honor as a nation. We lost our self-esteem. We also lost the institutions of our country. We were not allowed to organically build on our long history and heritage. So a German revisionist has to not only revise historical facts but also bring borders into question, because we were stripped of vast territories in the Second World War. As a German revisionist, I cast a far wider net than an American revisionist or a French revisionist. They are engaged in what Dr. Faurisson, the world’s most famous revisionist, calls the greatest intellectual adventure at the tail end of the twentieth century. To me as a German person, I want my nation’s honor restored. I want lies to be exposed as lies, frauds as frauds. I want borders to be recognized where ethnic Germans were living long before America was discovered. In Germany, we must have an internal revision of our political system, that was grafted upon us by Allied conquerors. Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control. The government in power in West Germany, which is now expanded all the way to the Oder River, is nothing but an instrument of Allied control, not of freedom. We Germans need revision from the inside — of our borders, of our institutions. Americans are lucky: they can only concern themselves with “were there gas chambers, or were there not gas chambers?” I am the most radical and the most sweeping of the revisionists, and this is why some of the more intellectual revisionists sometimes look upon me a little askance. They can afford to be scholars. I am a street activist revisionist because we, as Germans, want our country back, want our honor back. We want our father’s generation to be exonerated and rehabilitated. By the year 2000, I hope that the job is done regardless of bombs or fires.

I am sorry to say that most Americans-and I talk to ordinary Americans every day-even Americans of German descent, who get their news from the newspapers and the major TV networks, think that “holocaust” revisionists are either kooks or hate-filled bigots. “Everyone knows,” so they say, “that the Germans killed six million innocent Jewish people by gassing. To say that they didn’t is the equivalent of saying that the Civil War never happened.” What do you say to such people? What is the strongest evidence for your doubt of the “six million” story?

That’s a very good, broad, and sweeping question. As you know, I commissioned an American gas chamber expert, an execution expert named Fred Leuchter, to go to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, which were allegedly the “industrial killing centers” where the Germans supposedly dispatched all kinds of people to their deaths in gas chambers. That man came back with 33 samples — soil samples, rock samples, samples from the drains, the walls, the ceilings. He took a draftsman along and a video photographer who recorded all the activities while they were taking the samples. All of these samples were bagged. They were only handled with rubber gloves. They were numbered and dated. Special technical drawings were made of all the installations, and it was marked where in each installation these samples were taken. They were taken to the United States, and were tested in a blind test; the lab was not told what they were testing. They thought it was an industrial accident. They came back with absolutely no traces of any of the killing compound in some of the major “gas chambers.” For instance, in Auschwitz-1, where they have taken all the tourists through for the last 40 years, not a single trace of the compound Zyklon-B was found. This is, to me, scientific forensic proof. Science doesn’t suspend its rules or its laws for Zionists, for Communists, for Nazis, or for anybody else.

Are you saying that these were the rooms where it is claimed that mass executions by gas took place?

Right.

These very rooms show no traces of the killing compounds?

No traces, or very minute ones, and the very minute ones are explainable: as morgues, and that’s what these rooms were, they had to be fumigated. When dead bodies are put into a morgue, they get cold, and then lice leave that dead body. The louse was the chief carrier of the typhus disease. These rooms had to be fumigated once in a while. And we have taken a test sample of a chamber, an actual delousing chamber, which the Poles, the Germans, the Jews and everybody else agrees had been a delousing chamber for mattresses, uniforms, and so on. We took a sample from that as a kind of guiding sample, and compared to what it was in the “gas chambers,” where millions were supposed to have been exterminated by gas, it is incredible how high the residue was there. And how nonexistent or very small it was in the alleged “gas chambers.”

This report, called The Leuchter Report, is included in your encyclopedic book.

That’s right. The full examination, with all the drawings and so in, is in there, as well as the booklet for which I was charged and which was the basis for the nine-year litigation.

If any of your listeners are interested, I don’t know if you’ll permit me to make a little commercial, but for $50 plus $5 postage, we will send them this thick book. It will save them months or years of going down the false track, as Dr. Faurisson said. Dr. Faurisson researched for years in the wrong direction. With this one book, we can save you years out of your life. (Information for ordering this book is at the end of this article)

You have admitted a patriotic motivation for wanting to clear Germans of these accusations in the hate propaganda against them. Is there a political motivation on the part of all “holocaust” revisionists? Are they all on the political right?

Actually, that is a complete misunderstanding and it was created by the “holocaust” promotion lobby; organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It’s simply not true.

My Romanian Jewish friend Joseph Burg, who was a “holocaust” revisionist and has written five books, was certainly not pro-nationalist or pro- Nazi. He was himself put into pales of settlement during the Second World War. Many of these people are unabashed champions of truth. They are championing truth above all. It goes way back to the French socialist and member of the French national assembly, Paul Rassinier, and down to Dr. Faurisson. Dr. Faurisson came to revisionism as a man of the left, not of the right. I remember when I first met him in California in 1979, he was certainly anything but nationalist. Bradley Smith in the United States, who was married at one time to a Jewish woman, certainly is anything but National Socialist or nationalist. The same can be said for so many other revisionists.

That I, Ernst Zündel, as a German, am passionately pro-German I think people can understand or ought to understand. If America was ever befallen by a tragedy, like the German people were, I hope and I pray that American sons would rise up and defend America the way I try to defend my own ethnic group. I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes. In hindsight, with 20/20 vision today, that means deprive people of their liberty, put them in concentration camps, deny their human rights. I was horrified when during my trial I found out how easily people could be put in concentration camps in England, in Canada, in America, in Germany. There seems to have been a whole concentration camp syndrome going on in the whole Western world. So we should not judge countries like Germany, or even the incarceration of Japanese-Canadians in Canada or Japanese-Americans in America, with our 20/20 hindsight, and being as sensitized to human rights as we are today. It was not fashionable in 1935, 1940, 1941, or 1942 to be a human rights activist. It certainly wasn’t fashionable in Canada. I know of none that protested the incarceration of the Japanese. I don’t know of many in the United States. I certainly haven’t heard of any Russian human rights activists during the time of Stalin’s Gulag. And in England it was the same.

I think we should put the war behind us. There is world of ignorance and apathy to be conquered. Historical revisionism is a tool to make the historical record conform to documents, not to propaganda.

Usually history is written by the victors. You are trying to correct that 50 years later.

This is so often said to me, and I am so sick and tired of people saying “it’s justified.” Everything is justified, because after all “we won” the Second World War.

If that is true, then all the GIs, all the British Tommies, all the Canadian soldiers, and all the other soldiers that were part of this coalition of 51 countries that were at war with Germany, have to take responsibility for what has befallen the Western world today, and the world generally. The subjugation by Stalin of half of Europe: 250 million Europeans that lived for half a century under this horrific Soviet empire, and all of the millions of deaths that ensued as a result of that — they are responsible for that. It’s not all motherhood and apple pie. Also, those GIs who bombed Germany into the stone age are responsible for what has happened to our society in America, in Canada, in England. They are responsible for our current immigration policies.

It’s not fashionable or Politically Correct to say it, but I have earned the right by incarceration, fines, bombs, and arson, and I tell you that the mess that we are in today, the cesspool that our societies collectively have become, the thievery, the whole litany of travails of the Western world, all began in 1945.

I’ve said it before on this program, and I’ll say it again: 1945 was a victory for Communism and those who were behind Communism on both sides of the Atlantic.

That’s right. I want to plead for my own father’s generation. It was a magnificent generation. That generation of Germans, along with volunteers from Denmark, Holland, even England and the Free India division and so on, we Europeans were alert and awake to the danger of Bolshevism. Fifty years before President Reagan called it the evil empire, my father was fighting the evil empire at the gates of Moscow. I think that it’s about time that the Western world forget its breast- beating and pay respect to those men who fought their way to Stalingrad trying to topple that evil empire. There is nothing redeeming about Stalin’s Bolshevism, and it is a shame that Western man, that Europeans, that German-Americans, that Anglo-Saxons would ally themselves with the Soviet Union to battle to the ground a European power. I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.

When is there going to a monument or a major Hollywood movie depicting and memorializing the deaths of those who died under Communism? I’d like to see that happen.

I am very hopeful. I have lived in North America, and have watched the struggle for freedom, internally in Canada and America. Especially in America. I have every hope that salvation — and this might sound strange to you as an American — will come from America. The defeat of Europe came from America. Stalin was beaten by the Germans. America saved Bolshevism. I am quite sure that freedom will be saved, and that freedom will come from North America. Our concept that we have now in Canada and America of freedom of speech allows us to correct history. Just yesterday, I had a phone call from Germany, from a young German who had attended a lecture by Raul Hilberg, the “pope of the `holocaust’,” who said in Heidelberg less than a week ago that we must not shut off the debate about the “holocaust.” We must be allowed to ask questions about the “holocaust.”

That is a heartening sign, but in many nations you can now be jailed for doubting the “six million” story.

You’re looking at one who did. I just spent six days, for that very reason, in a German jail and just recently was convicted and fined 12,600 marks, which is about $10,000. This is now going to the European human rights court, because the German judicial system did not allow Fred Leuchter, Dr. Robert Faurisson, and the German chemical expert G. Rudolf to appear as witnesses, even though all three were in the witness room, ready to give their testimony. They refused to allow me to present exonerating evidence, or at least reasons for why I thought what I thought. That’s totally illegal under the European human rights code, and I am quite sure that eventually we are going to reverse this judgment.

Well, I hope that these laws are also reversed. From an American perspective, where we still, just barely, have freedom of speech (though Zionist lobby groups are trying to take that right away from us), I find it almost inconceivable that people are being jailed for doubting someone’s version of a particular event that happened 50 years ago. It’s like Alice’s Through the Looking Glass. It’s insanity.

I am, as a European, absolutely shocked by European people. I am also shocked by European nationalist people. They have allowed themselves to be so emasculated so silently. I, of course, have become acculturated in North America. I am particularly proud of what Americans and German- Americans achieved 200 years ago with the American constitution, with the Bill of Rights and its various amendments. I claim that as part of our German-North American heritage. I’m sad that we were never able to export it to Europe. If Europe had — if Germany had — if France had — if the peripheral countries in Europe had a semblance of your system we could at least begin to make a change because we would have the freedom to speak. This is why America is so very important. All the troubles that you and I know that exist in America are minute compared to the problems that we would have if we could not speak out and try to correct them.

You have been hounded for your beliefs. Your business was ruined. For nearly a decade of your life you were fighting jail or deportation in court, and now you have nearly been killed. Most men would have given up long ago, and gone and watched the birds or tended their gardens. What makes you keep going? Why do you do it?

Many people, my sons and my grandchildren have asked me this, and I can only say to you that once your conscious mind is expanded to the truth of what really happened, it is so horrific. The world is really in the grip of manipulated history that will take us all down. It’s like in computerese: “Garbage in; garbage out.” If we persist in thinking that what we have is history and use it as a precedent to build a better society we are going to inherit nothing but ruins. I want a better world, a cleaner world, a safer world, a saner world. The men who died on the German side, I can assure you, 99 per cent of those men died for a noble cause. There were almost 10 million German people who gave their lives in the Second World War, civilians and soldiers. They did not have to die in vain. I’m making sure that their deaths are ennobled by me sticking up for what they fought for.

I think you ennoble the deaths of the American soldiers too, quite frankly. They believed that they were fighting for freedom of speech among other things.

I sure have pity for American soldiers, for Canadian veterans, and for British veterans. When they see their subways, when they hear from their grandchildren that they are no longer safe in their school-yards, and when they watch their public television become a kind of cesspool that purveys drug addiction and so on, I wonder if those veterans are not suffering greater psychological trauma and pain than the Germans who at least know that they were militarily defeated and they couldn’t change it.

I can tell you that I know several, Mr. Zündel. I know one man who literally cannot speak of his service in World War II. He was on a bomber that bombed Germany, and he cannot speak of it. He is reduced to tears.

I think that the time has come to stretch out our hand to all those who were deceived, as well as even the deceivers. In all my programs, and in all of my writings, I’ve always extended my hand to decent Jews and people who served the Allied cause.

I say to them: Fifty years have gone by. The war was a tragedy for all of us: all who were touched by it, not just Jews. Jews have no copyright on pain. Let’s now get on with our lives and create a better world.

* * *

Source: Free Speech magazine, June 1995

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