Jailbirds

Ernst Zundel, currently awaiting trial for inciting racial hatred in his native Germany, has become the cause célèbre of the neo-Nazi movement. In early February, at which time he was being held in Canada, several coordinated demonstrations were organized both in the US and abroad to demand his release (the biggest demonstration, outside the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles, attracted only 30 people – see photo). During a recent performance by Prussian Blue, the Gaede girls dedicated a song to him, arousing applause and whoops of approval from the assembled crowd.

Zundel suffers from many illusions – he thinks only 300,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust, he thinks that less than 20,000 Jews died at Auschwitz, he believes that UFOs are in fact Nazi airships that fly out from a secret base near the South Pole (I'm not kidding) – but he doesn't seem to have too many illusions about himself:

"I know my ideas are half-baked – I'm not exactly Einstein, and I know that. I'm not Goethe. I'm not Schiller. As a writer I'm not Hemingway."

Damn straight. It's curious that for someone who hates Jews so much – in this interview clip from 1997, he says of the Jews "I dislike intensely their parasitic nature and actions in the world" – he compares himself unfavourably with Einstein. In the same interview, he cites a claim made by David Irving that "fewer Jews died during the entire war than the British killed during one single bombing raid on one German city on one night." However, Irving himself had repudiated this claim over a year before the interview when he stated that he believed as many as four million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the war, a figure at the extreme low end of the range of estimates made by professional historians.

In fact, Irving has apparently retreated altogether from his former position as Holocaust denier, since he now says he believes in the existence of the gas chambers. Unfortunately, this recant has not helped him with his current troubles, as an Austrian court has just denied him bail, ensuring that he, like Zundel, remains in jail.