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Holocaust Revisionist Ernst Zündel has spoken out at length for the first time since his release from prison in Mannheim, Germany on March 1st, 2010. He was interviewed by Kourosh Ziabari, an Iranian media correspondent, freelance journalist and the author of Book 7+1. The interview was published by Foreign Policy Journal on April 30th, 2010, and is available in full HERE.

Zündel speaks out about his capture, prison life, the limits of free speech in Europe, denies any white supremacist connections, and the differences between Zionist Jews and non-Zionist Jews. For fear of being re-arrested, he does not give his opinion about the veracity of the Official Authorized Version of the Holocaust. I will present some of the more interesting excerpts of the interview after the jump.

How Ernst Zündel was captured:

…I was told what actually happened by a friend of ours with high-level UN connections. In his own words: “It was the Blue Booklet that did it! That’s when it was decided at the very highest level to take you out for good!”

Here is what happened, briefly: In the early months post-9/11 my wife, an avid Internetter, discovered a compelling research document entitled Stranger than Fiction: An Independent Investigation of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism by Anonymous, 11-11-2 [the Blue Booklet]. She gave it to me over breakfast. I read it, found it interesting, and ran a few copies off on my printer for people on my mailing list. I did not write that lavishly footnoted paper. I did not research it. I merely copied it. Somebody must have concluded that I, with my background of thorough forensic investigations in other areas, showed more than ordinary interest in 9/11 as a potential political false flag common in intelligence agency operations!

{snip}

The initial reason given [for his arrest in the U.S.] was an alleged immigration infraction – namely a “visa overstay”. I was no terrorist; I was a dissident writer. My political detractors knew perfectly well that I was in America legally, awaiting adjustment of status due to my marriage to an American citizen. I was in Immigration Adjustment of Status proceedings, meticulously following all the prerequisite steps. I was living openly in a rural area in Tennessee and was listed by address in the local telephone book. The U.S. government had given me a Social Security number, a work permit, a document that allowed me to leave the country and return unmolested. I had undergone and passed an FBI check and a health clearance. The only last step missing was a personal interview by an immigration official to ascertain a valid marriage to my American citizen wife.

We had been notified in writing that this interview could take as long as three years, and that no status report would be given. We were patiently waiting for that last step, a routine interview with an immigration official. Our immigration attorney had requested such an interview in writing – twice! Under oath, he testified that he had written those letters. These letters have mysteriously disappeared from our immigration file. When I was arrested, it was claimed that I had negligently “missed a hearing” which gave them grounds for an arrest due to a visa overstay. In other words, a simple bureaucratic loophole was found or fabricated that has cost me seven years of my life.

The conditions of Ernst Zündel’s incarceration (he describes his pre-trial and post-trial incarceration in three different countries in the same narrative):

I was incarcerated in six different prisons on two continents in three countries—the USA, Canada, and Germany—without relief of any kind. In effect, I have had 10 percent of my life stolen from me – and for what “crime”? For having “overstayed my U.S. visa”?

Throughout my imprisonment, basic human rights principles were trampled underfoot repeatedly and with impunity. The worst prisons were the Canadian detention centers at Thorold, Ontario and at Toronto West, where I was held for two long years in isolation cells, ice-cold in the winter, no shoes or socks allowed. The electric light in these cells, bright enough to be able to read, was kept on 24 hours a day. Through a glass slot in the door I was checked every 20 minutes, and my activities were meticulously noted by the guards: one sheet for every day. No dignity, no privacy. My toothbrush was kept in a plastic bin in a hall. I was not allowed to speak to other prisoners. Bed sheets were changed only after three months. No pillows. No chairs. When I wrote to my wife or to my attorneys, I had to sit on a makeshift pile of my court transcripts. No radio, no television, not even an electrical outlet to sharpen my pencils. No ball point pens, only pencil stubs, cut in half with a saw. No spoons, forks, or knives were permitted; only a white plastic spoon with a fork called a “spork” that had to be returned every time at the end of the meal. With very few exceptions when furtive guards showed me some kindness away from the surveillance cameras, I was treated as though I was the worst of criminals. That’s Canada for you, where I have lived and worked without a criminal record for more than 40 years.

It was somewhat better, but not much, in the United States. In Germany, it was quite a bit better in terms of the basic necessities, but personal mail was routinely withheld – 1,700 letters for up to five years – even after I forced a court to order that it be given to me…

Ernst Zündel’s observations about his trial:

My so-called trial in Mannheim was a political show trial in the Stalinist mode in that my guilt was a foregone conclusion. I requested that exculpatory exhibits be allowed as validation for what I believed and had written and said. No meaningful defense was allowed. I could not put on record any forensic evidence, any historical documents, or even expert witnesses, That very request to be allowed to offer evidence was held to be a new offense of criminal behavior and could have resulted in new criminal charges – as were, in fact, lodged against my lawyers during that very trial who tried to overcome these restrictions.

{snip}

During my trial in Mannheim, ostensibly for “Holocaust Denial”, portions of my monthly newsletter, where I mentioned this booklet and the 9/11 topic, were referenced by the prosecution as criminal offenses. Only after it became clear that I welcomed the opportunity to have my attorneys present forensic evidence of a potential 9/11 cover-up were those portions of the accusation against me hastily dropped, and my trial became a “Holocaust Denial” show trial in the traditional Stalinist mode, “… accuse wildly but don’t allow a defense!”

Ernst Zündel speaks out on the differences between Zionists and Jews:

Yes, the two are totally different. Some Orthodox Jews who are united against Zionism, such as the Neturei Karta, believe that also. They know the godfathers of Communism and Zionism followed identical policies. The guiding spirit behind the two systems is the same. Neturei Karta rabbis attended the 2006 Teheran Conference sponsored by your President [Ahmadinejad] in an attempt to distance themselves from what they consider to be a dangerous atheist clique in the pursuit of illegal politics of conquest of which they want no part.

Read the full interview HERE. Visit the Zundelsite for more revisionist news.

There have been four distinct kinds of Holocaust revisionism. The first is the obscene categorical denial version embraced by the Ernst Zundel crowd. The second features the more subtle approach endorsed by historian Ernst Nolte, who does not deny the factuality of the Nazi annihilation of Jews but who observes that the Communists murdered more people than the Nazis did, thus suggesting that the Holocaust be viewed in a wider moral perspective.

Saul Friedlander, the author of Memory Comes and a recent book on Jewish diaries and journals composed during the Holocaust, noted in a lecture at the University of Toronto two years ago that a third even more disconcerting revisionism is surfacing in Germany. In this incarnation some German scholars indeed take note of the magnitude of the Holocaust but assert that while this might be of special interest to Jews, Germany in World War II, was involved in a much wider agenda and it behooves German historians to concentrate on those other sectors of military activity.

There is no point wasting time arguing with the warped views of Holocaust deniers. The German scholars who seek to de-emphasize the Holocaust by alluding to the brutality of Communism or by enlarging the preoccupation with the Third Reich’s global war efforts – are engaged in a devious ethical game. Comparing the Nazis to Communists is a cheap ruse for excusing or minimizing, through the medium of relativism, the unspeakable crimes of Germany 1933-1945.

As for those who hold that Germany was involved in things other than the Holocaust during World War II, there is some truth to that, but the satanic “war against the Jews” was different from Germany’s other battles: the Jews were defenceless and were slaughtered after they had surrendered. There can be no hiding of this through recourse to Germany’s other involvements in the Second World War.

The fourth expression of Holocaust revisionism has now been thoroughly studied by Gild Margalit, a professor at the University of Haifa. It is perhaps the most powerful of revisionist pathologies because it has an appeal to patriotic Germans and because it does not deny the Holocaust. What it does is reduce the impact of the murder of six million Jews by pointing out that an almost equal number of Germans died in “defending” the homeland and that the immense suffering of the German people during the allied bombings as well as the deportation of millions of the Volksdeutsch after the war – amounted to a tragedy comparable to the Holocaust.

Margalit observes that in the immediate post-war period Germans did experience a profound guilt over the Holocaust once the facts became known but that feeling soon dissipated and was replaced by a wave of self-interrogation, which prompted even some anti-Nazis such as concentration camp Bishop Niemoller and later politicians Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt to reject the idea of collective guilt. As the decades passed, this idea gained more and more credence and support, especially when defenders of the German nation turned the spotlight on the allied bombing raids on Dresden and Hamburg.

Much of that feeling is seen all over Germany today in monuments, memorial statues, shrines and grottoes commemorating the German war dead. In the early days after World War II, it was the dead of World War I who were remembered almost exclusively; today, as President Ronald Reagan discovered during his visit to the cemetery in Bitburg, German soldiers, including those who were in the SS, are included.

Today, 65 years after World War II ended, equivalence is being drawn between the suffering of Germans and that of Jews during the war, as if that trade-off liberates Germany from any responsibility for the former.

This is perhaps the most disturbing of all the Holocaust revisionisms.

Letters to the Editor:
editor@jewishtribune.ca

The courageous western Canadian attorney Doug Christie here speaks briefly on the release of Ernst Zundel from Mannheim prison, Germany after five years’ incarceration, and Zundel’s previous two years in solitary confinement in Canada in harsh conditions after he was denied bail. Mr. Christie notes that the Canadian judicial inquisition that led to Mr. Zundel’s deportation to Germany was held in a special “security certificate” court in which testimony was given in secret by secret witnesses who could not be known or cross-examined by the defendant, on the specious pretext that publisher Ernst Zundel was a violence-prone terrorist (!). All this was permitted by Judge Pierre Blais, who will live in infamy as surely as Torquemada does. Here we see, under the “fighting terrorism” rubric so popular in the U.S., the reappearance of the hated tyranny of the star chamber court of despots such as King Charles I of England and his henchman, Bishop Laud, which led to civil war and the execution of the king and his bishop. We wish that Justice Blais would repent openly of his crime against Zundel and make amends; that is our first hope. If not, let him be dealt with by God on Judgment Day.

We are pleased to announce a very fine response to our “On the Contrary” opinion poll on Ernst Zundel.

A total of 824 persons voted in the course of four days. An overwhelming majority voted in support of Ernst.

That’s nearly eight hundred votes in the space of just few days, with no publicity other than what we ourselves generated in “The Hoffman Wire” (our e-mail service that transmits our columns via electronic mail*), at our website and on this, our “On the Contrary” blog, where the poll was conducted.

Other than a couple of Hoffman Wire readers who spread the word via private e-mail, the poll was not publicized by any other group, and yet with our limited resources almost 800 people took the time to visit our blog and vote to show their support for Mr. Zundel. If our poll is any representative sample of worldwide sentiment, then Ernst Zundel has not only not been forgotten, he is lionized.

We thank everyone who participated. I would like to take this opportunity to announce that we are seeking to raise the funds needed to reprint my long out of print 1985 book, The Great Holocaust Trial, about the first of the two show trials the government of Canada prosecuted against Ernst, both of which he won on appeal. Naturally I am biased in favor of the first trial because I reported it from the press gallery and it is one of the few instances on record of “Holocaust survivors” and “homicidal gas chamber eyewitnesses” being cross-examined by a defense attorney – and not just any attorney – rather by the skilled and relentless Doug Christie, backed by the brilliant research of revisionist historian Dr. Robert Faurisson.

The last resort of every Auschwitz execution gas chamber zealot is the familiar shibboleth, “We have eyewitnesses!” This is supposed to represent the final coffin in the nail of revisionist doubts. Alas, poor mythomaniacs, you can never be the same after what the Zundel defense team did to you 25 years ago, from January through March, 1985. As G.K. Chesterton observed, “A lie is only young once,” which makes the Auschwitz execution gas chamber lie as old as sin.

In the course of the Great Holocaust Trial, the testimony of the key witness of the famous War Refugee Board, Rudolf Vrba, was shredded, along with that of former Auschwitz inmate Arnold Friedman and others. Famed holohoax historian Prof. Raul Hilberg was left a pile of quivering jello as he replied, when asked by Mr. Christie to furnish even one scientific report proving mass murder by gassings, “I’m at a loss.”

Bringing The Great Holocaust Trial book back into print on the 25th anniversary of the trial and in the year Mr. Zundel valiantly emerged from his German-Zionist dungeon – with his head high and a smiling countenance – will be a resounding refutation of the notion of foolish advocates of tyranny, that revisionism is in retreat.

Revisionism is fueled and strengthened by heroism in the face of enormous odds and martyrdom in the face of demands to recant and capitulate. Ernst was not killed by the fanatic partisans of the cult of Holocaustianity, but many a lesser man’s mind and spirit would have been broken by the years in prison, including two in solitary confinement in a Canadian dungeon. Seven years of his life were lost, and for what offense? The “crime” of daring to doubt an edifice that cannot endure doubts. Truth does not require dungeons to protect its credibility, only a lie so immense.

Congratulations to you, Ernst Zundel. Almost 800 percipients of our little Internet presence, 96% of all who responded, have rightly declared you a hero and a martyr to the cause of Freedom of Speech. How many opinion polls achieve such unanimity? It is almost unheard of.

The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine said, “The elite are an example or they are nothing.”

Zundel is an example!

A critic has made a negative remark about the photograph of Auschwitz gas chamber skeptic Ernst Zundel (above, on the right), and his attorney, Dr. Herbert Schaller, taken on March 1, moments after Zundel emerged from Mannheim prison for the first time in five years.

We believe it is a beautiful photo, a truly heart warming picture. It is evidence, by way of a photograph, that Ernst will not bow to adversity, he will not whine, he will not show pain, but rather, in his smiling countenance one sees the joy of life. This is a testimony to his spirit, after seven years’ incarceration, including two in solitary confinement in Canada. Let us also not forget that as a child he survived the Allied firebombing holocaust against his hometown of Pforzheim; consequently, on top of it all, he is a holocaust survivor. I have seen a similar serenity and nobility in Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts.

This is a stunning contrast to the behavior and attitudes of many (though not all) of those poster soul-survivors of the Auschwitz slave labor camp, who, more than sixty years later, still pose with long faces, perpetually moaning, groaning, wailing, hectoring, spewing hatred and pointing fingers of accusation, while churning out a deluge of newspaper and magazine articles, books, novels, television shows and films constituting a new level of institutionalized vengeance, which has been weaved into the very fabric of the post-Christian West.

I say post-Christian, but we are even heedless of William Shakespeare. Surely Portia’s famous speech to Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” (Act 4, scene 1), is now discredited by the mandarins of mediocrity. Yet, in Portia’s words we have our culture’s most eloquent reply to the perpetual Purim cry for vengeance under the rubric of justice. Here Shakespeare, as usual, put his finger on the heart of the matter: the vast chasm separating Judaism from the ante-Auschwitz West is their enshrinement of revenge and our obligation to mercy.

Zundel’s merciless persecutors have learned nothing from history. In their hubris, in their certainty that they will prevail and control and edit the future, they believe they can demonize, imprison and torment prisoners of conscience with impunity. The Romans imagined this about the early Christians, the French Catholics about the Huguenot, the German Lutherans about the Anabaptists, the New England Puritans about the Quakers, the Anglicans about their recusant Catholic countrymen, and the Soviets about the Eastern Orthodox. Yet, in each case history teaches that in time, the severely oppressed dissidents emerged stronger than ever.

This too is the destiny of World War II revisionists, though today, in the midst of intense persecution and witch-hunting, it is a future difficult for many to envision. In this sense, Ernst Zundel, even at age 70, is not a man of the past, but of the future.

First, hearty congratulations on being released yesterday as a political prisoner incarcerated by what you so rightly call the German “vassal state.” The soulless descendants of men whose boots they are not fit to even lick extracted the full term of their 5-year sentence imposed upon you for being a heretic.

It is almost five years to the day since I was called to the Metro West Detention Center (in Canada) where you had been kept in solitary confinement for 25 months – confinement usually reserved for the most dangerous of criminals. This treatment was what one might expect from the sorry hypocritical Canadian state that loves to wag its finger and preach human rights but is as comfortable as its Red Chinese pals in jailing dissenters or gagging the Internet. In some ways, though, Ernst, your ideas, your dissent from the new religion of holocaust, was more dangerous to our political establishment and the minority puppeteers than the activities of a gunman, rapist, or armed robber.

JB and I went around to the prison to collect boxes of your correspondence reflecting the hundreds of devoted people around the globe who had written to you to support and encourage you in prison.

We learned that you had been sneaked on a private jet – which government paid for that ? – surreptitiously (“security” reasons, you know) – to be sent back to Germany to face charges for Internet postings legally made in North America. The extraterritorial claim of jurisdiction, of course, didn’t trouble Canada’s highly politicized courts and they had blithely consigned you to a kangaroo trial and certain jail in Germany.

So, Ernst, we go back a long time. The Canadian Association for Free Expression did its modest part to help publicize your various cases going back to 1985 and the ludicrous “false news” charges for which you were3w twice prosecuted. Later we joined as an intervenor in the Canadian Human Rights Commissions’ Sec. 13 “Internet” hate charges, a case that went on from 1996 to 2002.

In the Toronto Sun (March 2, 2010), Mark Bonokoski, unable to act as anything from a hate-spewing voice for his ethnic group’s lobby called you a “rat.” The headline reported on the Canadian Jewish Congress website charged: “Rat let out of his cage.” Years ago, we called you the “Galileo of Revisionism.” A rat is vicious and secretive. You have always been friendly and upfront in the 1970s and 80s in your defense of the rights of German parents not to have their ethnic group defamed and vilified in schools, and later in your skepticism about the new state religion of “holocaust.”

Ultimately, you were punished, not because the facts and research you adduced to question the claims and assertions of the new religion were false, but because you had questioned at all. Many, probably you included, felt that the extravagant claims of German wrongdoing – the vehemence of which increased with each year as WW II receded into history – were matters of historical or scientific facts misreported or wrong. You sought to shed the light of research and statistics on these claims; that was not allowed.

One is not allowed to question or discuss what is called “the holocaust” because it is not a historical event – it is a religion – a religion that has all but become the state religion in most of what was once called “the Free World.” You were not punished because you got the facts wrong – you didn’t. You were punished because you were a heretic, because you refused to say that Ooga Booga, he with three purple horns, lived up on top of the mountain, was god and should be adored.

Thus, like Galileo, you refused to assent to foolish superstition or state imposed belief and sought to see what facts, eyewitnesses and forensics had to tell us of the events of WW II.

We honor you and rejoice in your release from prison. We pray and strive for the day when you enjoy real freedom and we in Canada – and even more your countrymen in super-repressive Germany – enjoy freedom of thought and freedom of expression, which are our immemorial rights.

Editor’s note: Paul Fromm is a courageous and tireless activist for freedom of speech. His career as a high school history teacher in Canada was unjustly terminated as a result of his activism.

Michael Hoffman’s note: Mr. Zundel is under a gag and his freedom of speech severely curtailed, so it is not accurate to say he is “free.” He has, rather, been released from a German dungeon. By “coincidence,” today just happens to be the last day of the Talmudic festival of revenge known as Purim, which ends tonight at sundown.

Ernst Zundel was freed today after serving five years in a German prison for denying the Holocaust. Zundel told reporters he did not know whether he would try to return to Canada. “I’m back out after seven years, three weeks, three prisons and three countries,” said Zundel, 70. A crowd of some 20 supporters clapped and shouted “bravo” as Zundel emerged from the prison in Mannheim shortly after 8 a. m. Some handed him flowers as he passed through the prison’s steel gates.

Zundel was extradited from Canada to face the German charges of inciting hatred for years of anti-Semitic activities, including contributing to a website devoted to denying the Holocaust — a crime in Germany. The Amerian website’s accessibility in Germany made it possible for German prosecutors to charge him with 14 counts. Zundel and his supporters had argued he was exercising his right to free speech.

On Monday he gave no details about his future plans, saying only that he wanted to improve his health and would return to his home region in the Black Forest. “Having spent the last seven years in a ‘chicken coop,’ I’ve gained a lot of weight. I have to lose that. I have to get checked out in a hospital,” Zundel said, though did not indicate that he was ill.

Asked if the Holocaust happened, he replied, “It’s kind of a sad situation; there’s a lot to say. I’ll certainly be careful not to offend anyone and their draconian laws,” he said.

Born in the Black Forest of Germany in 1939, Zundel emigrated to Canada in 1958 and resided in Toronto and Montreal until 2001. Zundel lived in Canada for four decades, making frequent court appearances to argue for the freedom to express his views in books and pamphlets and on a website. Despite his long stay in Canada, he was not able to convert his landed immigrant status into citizenship. Officials twice rejected his attempts to obtain citizenship and he moved to Pigeon Forge, Tenn., until being deported to Canada in 2003 for alleged immigration violations.

In February 2005, Federal Court of Canada Justice Pierre Blais ruled that Zundel’s activities were not only a threat to national security, but “the international community of nations” as well, clearing the way for his deportation to Germany. Zundel spent the last two years of his time in Canada in solitary confinement in a Toronto jail under anti-terrorism legislation.

He was immediately arrested upon arrival in his birth country in 2005 and held without bail because German authorities considered him a flight risk. In 2007, a German court convicted Zundel of 14 counts of incitement of racial hatred and sentenced him to five years in prison, the maximum allowed under German law for denying the Holocaust. In several European countries, including Germany, Austria, Belgium, Poland, Spain and France, Holocaust denial is a specific criminal offense. In Canada, Holocaust denial can be prosecuted as a hate crime.

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — On a quiet street in this little town in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains lives a family of refugees who were granted asylum in the United States because they feared persecution in their home country. The reason for that fear has rarely, if ever, been the basis of an asylum case. The parents, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, want to home-school their five children, ranging in age from 2 to 12, a practice illegal in their native land, Germany. Among European countries, Germany is nearly alone in requiring, and enforcing, attendance of children at an officially recognized school. The school can be private or religious, but it must be a school. Exceptions can be made for health reasons but not for principled objections. But the Romeikes, who are devout Christians, said they wanted their children to learn in a different environment.

Mr. Romeike (pronounced ro-MY-kuh), 38, a soft-spoken piano teacher whose young children greet strangers at the front door with a startlingly grown-up politeness, said the unruly behavior of students that was allowed by many teachers had kept his children from learning. The stories in German readers, in which devils, witches and disobedient children are often portrayed as heroes, set bad examples, he said. “I don’t expect the school to teach about the Bible,” he said, but “part of education should be character-building.” In Germany, he said, home-schoolers are seen as “fundamentalist religious nuts who don’t want their children to get to know what is going on in the world, who want to protect them from everything.”

“In fact,” he said, sitting on his sofa as his three older children wrote in workbooks at the dining table, “I want my children to learn the truth and to learn about what’s going on in the world so that they can deal with it.”

The reasoning behind the German law, cited by officials and in court cases, is to foster social integration, ensure exposure to people from different backgrounds and prevent what some call “parallel societies.” “We have had this legal basis ever since the state was founded,” said Thomas Hilsenbeck, a spokesman for the Ministry for Culture, Youth and Sport in the Romeikes’ state, Baden-Württemberg. “This is broadly accepted among the general public.”

The family has been here for some time, having left Germany in 2008. But it was not until Jan. 26 that a federal immigration judge in Memphis granted them political asylum, ruling that they had a reasonable fear of persecution for their beliefs if they returned. In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied on home-schooling parents, including taking custody of their children. Describing home-schoolers as a distinct group of people who have a “principled opposition to government policy,” he ruled that the Romeikes would face persecution both because of their religious beliefs and because they were “members of a particular social group,” two standards for granting asylum.

“It is definitely new,” said Prof. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown Law School’s asylum law program, who added that he had never heard of such a case. “What’s novel about the argument is the nature of the social group.” But, he said, given the severity of the penalties that German home-schoolers potentially face, the judge’s decision “does not seem far outside the margin.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has appealed the decision, Mr. Romeike’s lawyer said Friday. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment, citing the litigation.

The Romeikes had never heard of home schooling when they set out to find an alternative to the local public school in Germany, where their two oldest children — now 11 and 12 — were having trouble with rowdy classmates. The nearby private and religious schools, Mr. Romeike said, were just as bad or even worse. Then a woman in their church mentioned that some families, though none in the church itself, had taken their children out of school altogether. “She knew a family, but she didn’t want to mention their name because it wasn’t legal,” Mr. Romeike said. Months of research followed: the Romeikes read articles, sat in on court cases and talked to other home-schoolers in Germany. Eventually they decided to give it a try. Working with a curriculum from a private Christian correspondence school — one not recognized by the German government — they expected to be punished with moderate fines and otherwise left alone. But they soon discovered differently, he said, facing fines eventually totaling over $11,000, threats that they would lose custody of their children and, one morning, a visit by the police, who took the children to school in a police van.

Those were among the fines and potential penalties that Judge Burman said rose to the level of persecution. Mr. Romeike began looking to other countries, but his inability to speak anything other than German or English limited his options. Then, at a conference for home-schoolers in 2007, he saw Mike Donnelly, a lawyer for the Home School Legal Defense Association, a Virginia-based advocacy organization Long before the Romeikes had begun their fight, lawyers at the association had been discussing the situation in Germany. They had tried litigating cases one by one, usually unsuccessfully. In 2006, after the European Court of Human Rights declined to hear a petition by home-schooling parents that had failed in German courts, lawyers at the association decided to add a political line of attack to the legal one, both to raise awareness of the German policies and to find some broader solution to the issue. At a brainstorming session, one of the lawyers, Jim Mason, came up with the idea of petitioning for political asylum.

“I don’t know German law or German courts,” Mr. Mason said, “but I do know American courts.” Another German home-schooling family had already moved to Morristown, so the Romeikes sold many of their belongings, including their grand piano, and came here too. The court battle lasted over a year, and while the Romeikes’ lawyers said they had expected to succeed, they were surprised by the vigor of the judge’s opinion. So was the German government. “We’re all surprised because we consider the German educational system as very excellent,” said Lutz Hermann Görgens, the German consul general in Atlanta. He defended Germany’s policy on the grounds of fostering the ability “to peacefully interact with different values and different religions.” Mr. Romeike said he would like to return to Germany if the laws became more amenable to home schooling. There is still hope, he said, though the political landscape does not look too promising right now. In the meantime, he added, “it’s a good learning experience.” Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin.

Michael Hoffman’s Afterword: Note that President Obama’s Immigration department is appealing against the judge’s wise ruling. The U.S. government wants to force this family to return to Germany, where they may lose custody of their children.

Editor’s Note: There are several outright lies in this article from Der Spiegel (below). Bishop Williamson is not ill. He does not employ Orwellian “Holocaust” Newspeak and therefore does not “deny the Holocaust,” but rather the homicidal gas chamber allegation and the Kabbalistic casualty figure of six million. He did not, in Quebec (or anywhere else), call Auschwitz itself an invention, and he did not give the recent interview to French television in a room at SSPX headquarters in London.

Nevertheless, we are circulating this report because Der Spiegel is Germany’s mass market magazine and Bishop Williamson goes on trial (presumably in absentia) in Germany in April for his thought crimes. Consequently, it is important to assess what the Zionist-German media are telling the masses.

In the eyes of millions of people around the world, Bishop Williamson is an inspiring and distinguished figure, rather than an “embarrassment.” The embarrassment to Catholics is Pope Benedict XVI, who delivers soothing shibboleths to synagogue Pharisees while helping their “Shoah” theology gain firm purchase inside the Church; and certain leaders of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) who have betrayed Bishop Williamson, and their own founder, the late Archbishop Lefebvre, by rendering Williamson’s dissenting opinion about secular WWII history, grounds for negating the episcopal role for which Lefebvre consecrated him.

Bishop Williamson’s transgression is to have refused to propitiate the idol of “Holocaustianity,” which has surpassed Calvary in sacred status and on the scale of cosmic suffering. If he would only bow to this golden calf, he would regain his former responsibilities. Because he refuses this temptation, his usefulness to the SSPX is “lost,” according to the order’s superior.

Controversial Bishop Richard Williamson continues in his denial of the Holocaust, embarrassing both the Society of St. Pius to which he belongs and the Vatican. But the SSPX is becoming increasingly powerful despite the controversy and is attracting more and more supporters.

Richard Williamson’s complaints begin when he looks out the window of his office in Saint George’s House, the London headquarters of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). Just past the garden, at the base of a small hill in verdant Wimbledon Park, are a pond, golf course, croquet club and, most famously, the tennis courts.

The old man at the window likes tennis, which he admiringly calls the “greatest spectacle,” a game that involves “one spirit, one will.” In tennis, he says, it’s as if two gladiators were fighting each other, “just without bloodshed.”

But Williamson would not be true to form if he didn’t smell damnation in even the noblest of spectacles. The outfits worn by female tennis players, the bishop says indignantly, “hardly reach past the middles of their thighs.” Williamson has noticed female fans wearing even shorter skirts. “Aren’t there are any men left who tell their daughters, sisters, wives or mothers that this sort of outfit is only meant for the eyes of their own husbands?”

The world has become a smaller place for the notorious bishop. Since he denied the existence of the Holocaust on television more than a year ago, causing serious problems for Pope Benedict XVI and almost triggering a revolt against Rome by the Catholic faithful, the ultra-conservative SSPX has kept him in virtual quarantine at its Wimbledon headquarters. Bishop Bernard Fellay, the superior general of the SSPX, likens Williamson to uranium: “It’s dangerous when you have it,” he says, but you can’t “simply leave it by the side of the road.”

‘A Huge Lie’
Fellay knows what he is talking about. Williamson has no intention of revising his views on the gas chambers. When Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld sent him a book about the history of the Holocaust last year, he set it aside, unread. “The fact is that the 6 million people who were supposedly gassed represent a huge lie,” he wrote recently to his fellow members of the SSPX, noting that “a completely new world order was built” on this “fact.” The Jews, he added, “became ersatz saviors thanks to the concentration camps.”

Williamson, after refusing to pay a fine of €12,000 ($16,800), faces charges of inciting racial hatred in a trial in the southern German city of Regensburg set to begin on April 16. Although it is unclear whether he will appear at the trial in person, the bishop has already assembled a legal team that includes German lawyer Matthias Lossmann and the British attorney who once represented former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in his fight against extradition.

Both the obstinate bishop’s refusal to abandon his preposterous Holocaust theories and the trial in Regensburg are as embarrassing to the SSPX as they are to the Vatican, which is currently in direct talks with the fundamentalists. During the monthly meetings, three theologians from the SSPX sit, almost as they were participating in another Vatican council, across from three papal theologians in the Palace of the Holy Office, which is home to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and is adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica. This is as close to the Vatican as it gets. Left-leaning and liberal theologians like Hans Küng have spent their lives dreaming in vain of such an encounter.

The 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II, whose reforms helped to modernize the Catholic Church, is high up on the agenda of the members of the SSPX, who want to see it reversed as much as possible. For them, ecumenism is the stuff of the devil, the recognition of Judaism is a source of contention and the modern form of the liturgy is an impossible act of assimilation to the zeitgeist.

Their goal is to be recognized in Rome again after 22 years. The Vatican also wants to put an end to the division within the Church. But Williamson, who has been a thorn in the side of those seeking rapprochement, isn’t going away.

If a fundamentalist bishop like Williamson were to become unaffiliated, he would have the potential to divide the church once again. He could consecrate new priests at any time or establish his own, even more radical movement. This would be inconvenient for both Benedict and the SSPX, which is why Williamson is being tolerated.

‘These Men Are Rats’
Williamson’s refuge is a small guest room on Arthur Road in southern London, where he has a view of Centre Court at Wimbledon. The room is in a plain-looking, newer building, adorned only with two columns flanking the front door. A sign at the entrance to a chapel in the garden calls upon the faithful to pray during the SSPX’s upcoming “Rosary Crusade.” Father Lindström, a gaunt Swede, ensures that only the right people are allowed to visit Williamson.

The bishop has a reputation for being unpredictable. Sometimes he gives the staff instructions to tell visitors that he is not home, but on one occasion he sat down next to a Christmas tree for an interview with a video blogger. An interview with SPIEGEL, which had been scheduled for some time, happened to fall on a bad day. Williamson was only willing to appear on a stair landing, and even then, all that was visible of him were one of his arms and his hand wearing his bishop’s ring. His voice was easy to recognize, but he refused to speak directly with his interviewers, leaving Lindström to run up and down the stairs, delivering the questions and answers.

Later, Williamson decided to continue the interview with SPIEGEL by e-mail — even though he was only in the next room. The visit had made him very angry. “We are at war,” he raged, “and you are on the wrong side.” German liberal intellectuals are as distasteful to him as short skirts on the tennis court. “These men are, at least objectively, rats,” he wrote in a reference to SPIEGEL journalists.

Heresies and Errors

There is a strict regimen at the London headquarters of the Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii X, as the SSPX is called in Latin: wake up at 6:00 a.m., first prayers at 6:30, mass at 7:15, lunch at 12:45 p.m., rosary at 6:30, evening prayers at 9:00.

To the right of the entrance is the library, which has a separate cupboard for banned books. Guarded by two statues, one of Jesus and one of the Virgin Mary, a sign clearly identifies the dangerous publications in the cabinet as “Heresies/Errors.” On the top shelf is a book by the liberal German theologian Karl Rahner, a key influence on the Second Vatican Council, and next to it is a book that, though considered an authority by more than a billion Catholics, is far too modern for the SSPX: the “Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

Williamson lives on the second floor. This is where the bishop, who likes to perform lieder by Robert Schumann, removes his heavy bishop’s ring and plays works by German composers on the piano. “Music,” he says, “is an expression of harmony or disharmony in human souls.”

He also spends much of his time surfing the Internet, where he has loyal fans. There are 520 people registered as friends on his Facebook page, and hundreds read his columns on the Web, which he writes under the pen name “Dinoscopus” — a made-up word derived from dinosaur and episcopus (the Latin word for bishop). He cultivates his image as a reactionary and as keeper of the pure faith. Living in a large city is harmful, he recently pontificated while glancing at the tennis courts. It gets in the way of and destroys marriages, he said, turns young men into “washcloths” that are “washed out by liberalism,” so much so that “their common sense is diluted.”

Williamson is a sophisticated man who delivers powerful sermons. He is a literary scholar with a Cambridge degree who speaks perfect French, German and Spanish. He is also vain, appreciating refined manners and expensive clothes, and he forgets the world around him when he plays Beethoven. And he is someone who believes that no Jews were killed in the Third Reich’s gas chambers.

‘We Have Lost One of Our Four Bishops’

Bishop Fellay, Williamson’s superior, looks distressed as he sits in his office at Schwandegg Palace in Menzingen, Switzerland. He fervently hopes “that Williamson doesn’t explode.” The palace offers a sweeping view of Alpine foothills in the canton of Zug, where the old spa town sits atop a 900-meter (2,950-foot) mountain. The voices of oblates, devout lay women who help the priests run the household, can be heard in the hallways.

“We have lost one of our four bishops,” says Fellay. “We can’t use him for anything anymore.” He is struggling with himself and history, trying to find the right words and the appropriate amount of distance to the matter. He finds the whole thing “incredibly unpleasant,” and says that he had believed that “the bishop had understood things better in the meantime.” But unfortunately Williamson did not understand. Fellay says that his personal belief is that the Holocaust is “obviously” a fact.

But not all of his brothers are willing to agree. Shortly after the Williamson scandal broke in early 2009, an Italian priest, Father Floriano Abrahamowicz, speculated that the gas chambers may have been used merely “for disinfection,” and that Erich Priebke, a former captain in the SS who was involved in and later convicted of the shootings of hundreds of civilians in Italy, was in fact not an executioner. This too was “unpleasant” for the SSPX leadership.

On the other hand, the whole debate has had its advantages. Because of Williamson, the SSPX has acquired a level of notoriety unprecedented since its establishment in 1969 by the renegade French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Ultra-conservatives have always loved the Pius Brothers, and now they are becoming heroes of the right-wing, anti-modernist movement. What should a superior general like Fellay do about this?

Appealing to Extremists
“We have an appeal for extremists, who we don’t even want,” says Fellay, for whom questions of faith are ultimately the most important issues. One of those questions of faith revolves around who should have the say in religious matters in Switzerland: the church, with its beautiful churches and bell towers, or the mosques, with their minarets? This is why Fellay has fueled the recent debate in Switzerland over banning minarets. In fact, he welcomed the debate, because, as he says, Islam is “aggressive in general.”

On the other hand, the Pius disciples are perfectly calm and understanding when it comes to the mendacious and hate-filled speech coming from their own ranks. None of Williamson’s colleagues get upset when the bishop writes disparagingly about women in his blog, calling them “less than zeroes” and insisting that they are “under the power of the man.” “He should be your master,” he writes.

The Catholic brothers in Stuttgart showed their aggressive side against gays by staging a protest against the city’s Christopher Street Day parade, which celebrates gay pride. The priests held up signs that read “Save Children from Perversion,” and one of them condemned the event as “moral pollution.” He neglected to mention his fellow SSPX member’s denial of the Holocaust.

‘Fever in the Body of the Church’

To avoid misunderstandings, the ultra-conservatives have even hired their own PR specialist, Rudolph Lobmeyr, who once worked for the Austrian national public broadcaster ORF in Vienna, to explain the benefits of the Pius campaign to the public. “Fabric-softener faith is no longer wanted,” he says. He insists that people are looking for decisive leadership and want to be able to divide the world into good and evil — just as the SSPX does when it rages against gays, women and journalists. “It’s a reflection of the desires of many people, and it’s the secret to the society’s growing popularity,” Lobmeyr says.

“We are merely the thermometer indicating the fever in the body of the church,” says SSPX leader Bishop Fellay. The society claims to have 600,000 supporters. It maintains six seminaries, 14 districts, 161 priories and 725 mass centers and is active in 1,000 locations worldwide. The society is growing in the United States, Asia and Africa.

It was this potential that the pope had in mind when he lifted the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops last year. Benedict is a traditionalist and, like the Pius Brothers, he loves the Latin mass, shares their ideas about morality and sometimes despairs of modern society, which could turn a sentence Williamson uttered on a Swedish television program into a global scandal.

Fellay reports triumphantly that the pope himself — in keeping with the SSPX’s demands — apparently no longer places communion wafers into the hands of the faithful, but directly into their mouths. For Fellay, this represents yet another success in the battle against the modern church.

Growing Congregation
It is noon in the more than 700-year-old church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris, which has been occupied by the SSPX since 1977. All masses here are mumbled in accordance with the Latin ritual, accompanied by Gregorian chants, with the priest turning his back on the congregation — all standard practices for centuries, until the Second Vatican Council destroyed the traditions. A noticeably large number of young people are kneeling on the cold stone floor, and the air is heavy with incense smoke.

The Paris branch of the SSPX has noticed a sharp increase in church attendance since the beginning of last year. The priests have had to increase their weekly supply of communion wafers by 300 wafers, so that there will be enough to place on the tongues of the faithful. Perhaps the Holocaust scandal was responsible for the rise in attendance, or perhaps the new additions to the flock were encouraged by the pope’s lifting of the excommunication of the four bishops — or perhaps both factors played a role.

France is the society’s stronghold. It now has 100,000 supporters there, and 4,000 children attend its schools. Traditionalists see the movement as the future of Catholicism.

Strange Ideas
Niklaus Pfluger has just returned from mass at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. In the hierarchy of the order, the Swiss priest is second only to Bishop Fellay. When Williamson shocked the church a year ago by denying the Holocaust in an interview, Fellay immediately sent Pfluger to Argentina, where Williamson was staying at the time, to stop the renegade bishop from talking to the media.

Pfluger is still puzzled about the motives of his fellow SSPX member. Sitting in the Bistrot Saint Honoré in Paris, over a plate of mussels and a glass of 2002 Ladoix 1er Cru, he attempts to piece together an explanation. Williamson, he says, happens to be a first-class provocateur and has always had strange ideas. Right away on Sept. 11, 2001, he claimed that the US government had staged the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. He also claims that it wasn’t Japan but the White House that ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor, in an effort to draw the Americans into World War II.

During a sermon in the Canadian province of Quebec in April 1989, Williamson said that the Jews had invented Auschwitz as a way to derive certain benefits. Someone filed a criminal complaint against him, and Williamson has done his best to avoid Quebec ever since.

“He is actually an artist and not a scholar,” says Pfluger. “He gets an idea into his head, becomes fixated on it and exaggerates. But he doesn’t study the documents.” He calls Williamson a “ticking time bomb” for his organization, but he also points out that the bishop has many merits, and that he shouldn’t be “exiled to the Moon.”

Unpredictable Behavior
Pfluger is also concerned about the health of the 69-year-old bishop, who has apparently had Parkinson’s disease for several years. Could this explain his moody, unpredictable behavior? Pfluger and his fellow Pius Brothers have often been irritated by the emails they receive on a regular basis from London. In a recent email, Williamson wrote that “1.3 million deported people” were not gassed in the Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor concentration camps, but were simply transported to the part of the Soviet Union that was occupied by Germany. Ridiculous rumors to the contrary, Williamson added, should be ignored.

The society is also aware of Williamson’s contacts with Ingrid Rimland, the wife of Ernst Zündel, who is currently in a German prison after having been convicted of incitement to Holocaust denial. Rimland continues to disseminate her husband’s theories.

The bishop is also in touch via email with Swiss Holocaust denier Jürgen Graf, who is being sought by German, French and Swiss authorities. Graf believes that the idea of extermination camps was a Jewish invention. He plans to publish a new book about the Sobibor extermination camp, where about 250,000 Jews were killed in the gas chambers, entitled “Sobibor. Myth and Reality.” Graf says that he hopes Williamson will “write an introduction” to his book.

The priests paid particular attention when Williamson, at the beginning of the year, described his sojourn in London as an “unplanned but pleasant sabbatical.” It sounded as if he had had enough of the tennis skirts at Wimbledon, and was ready to start speaking out in public again.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,675163-3,00.html

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