Fredrick Toben Has Fond Recollections of Ernst Zundel
(by Mary W Maxwell, LLB)

I found the eulogy, below, for Ernst Zundel on the website AdelaideInstitute.org.

About eight years ago when I was a student at the University of Adelaide Law School, I heard that Fredrick Toben was having his day in court. This had to do with a lawsuit brought by someone who stood as “the spokesman for the Jewish community in South Australia.”

My lifetime involvement with admirable Jewish people tells me that the “spokesmsn” did not really speak for Australia’s Jews – how can one man speak for any ethnic or religious group? (Or even for one political party?)

Toben eventually spent 3 months in prison in South Australia for contempt of court. He had refused to alter some material on his website. Anyway, at the time I was not familiar with the subject matter (“Did Six Million Really Die?” – we now know that figure is metaphorical).

I popped along to the federal courthouse, in the expectation that loads of law students – not to mention faculty – would show up in regard to its being a freedom of speech issue.

Ah, good old freedom of speech. I was the only student there and not only were there no professors -- but it seems the previous Dean of Law, Catherine McEvoy, had been the Human Rights Commissioner that socked it to Fredrick. I think she was right to do so under “section 18C” of the relevant statute. It is the statute that is misguided.

To make a long story short, Australia does not have a Bill of Rights and off he went to prison. The judge (there was no jury) decided not to listen to Toben’s plea that we can’t live without truth. (A fact brilliantly defended by Ursula Haverbeck, age 89, who was recently arrested in Germany for “defaming the dead”—per German law.)

Actually Toben has a doctorate in philosophy and can put the truth eloquently, but Judge Lander “was not impressed,” as we say in Australia.

Thanks to the Adelaide case, I got interested in the matter and have enjoyed watching the rare personality of Ernst Zundel on many a Youtube video. In my usual contrary way, I think Jews owe Zundel a big thank-you and I think they will deliver on that before too long.

Germans, too -- Ernst revealed the puppet strings by which leaders of Germany are controlled. That’s a tragedy occurring in all nations today, and, in my opinion, has to do with a centuries-old conspiracy that ain’t run by an ethnic or religious group.

Please see Toben’s summation of Zundel’s career, in a letter he wrote to Ingrid Rimland, the wife of Zundel. She then died, in Tennessee, a few weeks after her husband’s death.

Here it is:

Dear Ingrid, Family, and Friends of Ernst,

It is with immense sadness that I heard of Ernst's untimely and unexpected death (on 6 August, 2017) and my thoughts are with you in this time of grief.

Judging by the reaction of the Revisionist community the Ernst Zündel legacy is assured and he will remain a monumental example of the Revisionist powerhouse, without which we would not have today, through the Internet, a raging debate about matters Holocaust. Again, my very heartfelt condolence on your loss.

I draw comfort from the knowledge that you are not alone in this time of grieving for Ernst because you are supported by all of Ernst’s countless friends. For almost half a century Ernst has been out there on the front line, a truly Germanic hero who has led in this Revisionist battle by setting a personal example to all who crossed his path.

Though I had never heard the name of Ernst Zündel before, the first time I came in contact with Ernst’s actual work was in 1971 when I witnessed a protest at the Stuttgart Königsplatz.

A handful of young people were protesting against the continued imprisonment of Adolf Hitler’s former deputy, Rudolf Hess (1894-1987), in the British sector of Berlin’s Spandau Prison. It is almost certain that British agents strangled him on 17 August 1987 because the Soviet Union was willing to release him.

Only 26 years later, in 1997, did Ernst personally advise me that this protest against Hess’ continued imprisonment had been a part of his global outreach work.

Ernst had set out to defend the German people against those hurtful allegations arising out of the International Military Tribunal trials, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials held for just on a year, from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946, and the subsequent Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965.

“... from 1942 to 1945, systematically exterminating human beings to an estimated total of six million, of whom four and a half million were exterminated by the use of Zyklon B in one camp alone, known as Auschwitz/Birkenau.” (That quote is from the website worldcourts.com.)

We all recall that it was Ernst’s 1988 trial that caused the Auschwitz-Birkenau plaques with the 4 million figure on them to be removed and replaced with the 1.5 million figure.

Then, after the Stuttgart Hess protest and during the late 1970s while teaching and travelling in Southern Africa, I came across individuals who mentioned to me there are researchers in Canada, USA, Britain, France, and Germany itself, who are questioning the details, if not disputing outright, the then prevailing post World War Two narrative.

These individuals had the courage to challenge the alleged factual and truthful accounts of what transpired during those 12 years, 1933-1945, in particular the allegation that people were killed in homicidal gas chambers.

Also, around the early 1970s German judge Dr Wilhelm Stäglich (1916–2006), wrote an article in a magazine about his 1944 experience at Auschwitz. The fact that Stäglich was also a member of the so-called right-wing nationalist party, NDP, saw him victimized by his own judiciary; he was forced into early retirement and had his pension halved for five years.

Add to that, when in 1979 the article was turned into a book: "Der Auschwitz Mythos," in 1983, his University of Göttingen revoked the doctorate title it had conferred upon him in 1951 on account of his 1979 published book lacking academic distinction. This was a warning to the German academic establishment not to touch matters Holocaust.

I mention Stäglich’s legal persecution because this kind of professional witch hunting procedure was then also viciously applied to Ernst by Canada’s Jewish pressure groups and their willing helpers.

In 1973 Thies Christophersen (1918-1997) published a slim booklet, "Die Auschwitz Lüge," wherein he recounts his time spent at Auschwitz from January to December 1944, and where he had been in charge of the synthetic rubber research laboratory that employed 200 Soviet women prisoners.

Christophersen had to flee across the border to Denmark where he was safe from German prosecution. He also appeared as a witness at Ernst’s first 1995 trial.

It became more intense for Ernst when in 1974 under his own publishing imprint, Samisdat Publishers, he published that now legendary "Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last," by Richard E. Harwood and Richard Verrall.

In 1976, Professor Arthur Butz had his definitive book published by Tony Hancock’s Historical Review Press, in England: "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," which in later editions had a subtitle: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.

Two years later, in 1978, NBC screened the four-part television miniseries Holocaust. This series began a relentless and definitive Holocaust fixation process that began engulfing the global community, and which has endured to this day.

Also in 1978, publisher Willis Carto established the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), and a year later the IHR held a significant inaugural conference, which brought together individual Holocaust Revisionists from around the world, among them the Frenchman, Robert Faurisson, and John Bennett from Australia.

One of the major individuals behind this global revisionist information campaign, who aimed to offer a counter-interpretation to the distortions produced by Hollywood was, of course, a resident living in Carlton Street, Toronto, Ontario – Ernst Zündel.

While Hollywood was distributing anti-German hatred propaganda there developed among the Hollywood establishment a great fear when they realized that Ernst also revved up his mammoth drive literally flooding the world with the true facts of the Jewish Holocaust.

And as Ernst had anticipated, soon enough a Jewish woman came along to claim victim status, hurt feelings, allegations of renewed persecution by Neo-Nazis, and so on. A lady by the name of Sabina Citron felt so hurt by what she had read in Did Six Million really die? that on 18 November 1983 she initiated legal proceedings against its publisher for “spreading false news”, then still a criminal act and a relique of 13th century English law, the “De Scandalis Magnatum” of 1275.

Mature individuals do not let themselves be hurt by the voluntary reading of a book, and this thus raises a fundamental question: Why did she not just throw the booklet away instead of venturing into the court system? The book was not a set text of any educational establishment.

And thus began Ernst’s Canadian and German odyssey through the legal system, especially his two trials in 1985 and 1988 and his 1992 Supreme Court Appeal, which ultimately acquitted him of any wrongdoing; but to then be continued with extradition to Mannheim, Germany, for another five years.

I need not here elaborate the details of this significant Jewish decision legally to take on Ernst. Suffice to say that Ernst did not bend to Jewish, or any other, pressure. In fact, he deliberately arranged for Fred Leuchter and his report to be presented on 20 April 1988.

I recall how Professor Deborah Lipstadt visited Australia in 1994 and together with colleague David Brockschmidt we undertook that eight-hour drive from Adelaide to Melbourne to hear her speak. She confirmed that she was only seeking the truth – let truth prevail – about the Holocaust and the six million and the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, etc.

Lipstadt also confirmed there were tonnes of documents that proved the homicidal gassing claims to be true and that Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf in their “laughable research” got it all wrong.

The tone and the self-certainty in which she spoke with us after delivering her talk unsettled us somewhat.

Then on my 1997 first Revisionist world trip I visited Ernst at his Carlton Street home, followed by more visits throughout the years. After his Canadian trials it was also so good to see Ernst establish himself with Ingrid at Pidgeon Forge, where I stayed a couple of days and enjoyed the typical Zündel hospitality.

I recall mentioning to Ernst the joke I had heard when I spent seven months at Mannheim Prison in 1999: “There are two types of people – those who have been inside and those who have it coming to them.”

It was at Bradley Smith’s home in Rosarito, Mexico, that on the night of 5 February 2003 we watched the evening news and saw Colin Powell hold up a vial with trucks appearing on a screen behind him that resembled World War Two army trucks – possibly like the mobile delousing gas vans the Germans had – and Powell’s claim the USA had found the proof that will indict Saddam Hussein for having used poison gas, anthrax, on his Iraqi people.

We both thought of the claims made by those who believe in the homicidal gassing nonsense that the Germans had mobile homicidal gassing vans wherein they killed countless prisoners.

I also mentioned to Bradley that while visiting the Zündels, Ernst had shown me a video clip of a controlled demolition, which he claimed would prove that 911 was an inside job. Bradley countered by suggesting Powell’s anthrax threat exposé will be used to invade and decimate Iraq – for the sake of Eretz Yisrael.

And soon after, in the by now obligatory read of Ingrid’s daily ZGram, what had also happened on that same day, 5 February 2003, was revealed: Ernst had been arrested at his home in Tennessee in a most irregular way; we covered this in Newsletter No 186 at Adelaide Institute’s website.

The reason why Ernst had left Canada in the first instance also rested on the fact that new human rights legislation, Hate Laws – as in Australia -- enabled individuals to launch legal action where truth was no defence but where a “hurt feeling” was enough to criminalize anyone accused of such.

It stood to reason that so-called Holocaust survivors would feel aggrieved by what Revisionists had factually researched about their Holocaust horror narrative. The physical proof that would support the factual existence of the homicidal gas chambers allegations simply could not be found.

After returning from my disturbing overseas trip I was angry at the US authorities for having bent to Jewish pressure in order to continue Ernst’s legal persecution. I was also angry at the Colin Powell episode.

And so, on 30 March I was in Jordan ready to join other human shields in protest at the impending US invasion of Iraq. I even applied for a visa at the Iraqi embassy in Amman but was advised that it was too late for a visit to Iraq because the war would start in a day, and other human shields, for example, from South Africa, were returning to Jordan.

And although I met his wife and family, I did not meet up with imprisoned Revisionist Ibrahim Alloush who had been a part of a Jordanian-wide street uprising/protest against what the US coalition was doing in Iraq.

Let me briefly return to 1984, which was significant because the IHR’s representative in Australia, John Bennett, had dared to include in his annual publication, “Your Rights,” an article about historical Revisionism, mentioning the disturbing -- to date then unquestioned -- historical fact that the “Holocaust” is a myth, a lie.. Distributors refused to handle the 1984 edition.

For the some-time politically left-leaning lawyer John Bennett, the Butz–Carto-Faurisson-Leuchter-Zündel connection was a blessing in disguise. He was dismissed from the Victorian Civil Liberties Union, which he co-founded, because those running it hated him for his Holocaust skepticism, and so he founded his own Australian Civil Liberties Union-ACLU, and continued to publish “Your Rights.”

When I was dismissed from my teaching position at the beginning of 1985 I began a closer legal association with Bennett and with various individuals who were also facing court, and suddenly I realized that the legal system was there not only to assist in resolving disputes but also there to lend a hand in stabilizing social structures through legal force, if necessary.

My successful eight-year legal battle to have my teacher dismissal matter declared “invalid” came at great expense – the family fractured and fell apart, as did friendships because horrible and tense family divorce proceedings break up former sound relationships as well. My local community was also divided.

I can thus relate to Ernst’s personal life as well with his second brief marriage that he called “character forming”.

And so whenever I had doubts, fears, regrets, just pure exhaustion in facing another day in court almost continuously since 1985, I considered this to be just another example of the eternal battle-of-the-wills of which we should be glad because it means we are still alive.

I also had Ernst as an example to follow because he did not give up and succumb to taking drugs of any kind in order to get through that rough patch. He also did not develop a hatred or a typical scapegoat mentality that blames everyone else for the misfortunes he suffered. On the contrary, Ernst’s 1985 and 1988 Holocaust trials were so victorious in themselves that Jonas Alexis rightly claims they destroyed the Holocaust.

And a final word about Ernst’s character, his modesty, his generosity, his fair-mindedness, his sense of humour, his lack of bitterness and hatred towards anyone. I think such a mature attitude of mind is achieved when you have a clear conscience in what your life has been about.

Ernst’s life has been a total sacrifice for Germany and for the world at large.
Thank you Ernst for having been there and for having set a personal example to all of us, and by having taken the Kantian maxim to heart:

Habe Mut, Dich Deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!

--Fredrick Toben lives in Adelaide and has stood up almost alone in the Australian federal court against the suppression of truth that is held legal by the Human Rights Commission.