Revisionism in a hard hat
HOW HOLOCAUST DENIER ERNST ZUNDEL CHARMED THE GULLIBLE
Ernst Zundel, the Zelig of Holocaust denial, died suddenly t his weekend at his ancestral home in the Black Forest of Germany. If he had died sooner, before his 2005 deportation from this country, I am afraid he would have been widely described in obituaries as “German- Canadian.” He lived here from 1958 to 2000, unsuccessfully trying a couple of times to obtain official citizenship, and was visible for years as a self- styled opponent of Germanophobic stereotypes in the popular media.
Fore see ably,Zun del turned out to be the ultimate German stereotype himself: a war baby who used Canada as a refuge from conscription and anti-Nazi laws back home, all while obsessively re-litigating the Second World War in pseudonymous anti- Semitic pamphlets and books. Most ethnic Germans abroad wouldn’t deny the Holocaust or complain of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, as Zundel did, but ... well, if you have studied German history seriously enough to talk about it socially, you will have run into folks who have funny ideas and tiny chips on their shoulder about, say, First World War reparations or the bombing of Dresden.
In Germany, any sense of nationalist injustice over the 20th century must be carefully hidden. Over here, parents and grandparents are more free to make such resentment a family heirloom. This, perhaps, is how Zundel was able to gain a Canadian following for the notion that the murder of the European Jews was a propaganda fiction.
In retrospect, his industriousness and personal cheerfulness turn out to have played a significant part in the epic of Holocaust denial. In 1986, the amateur historian David Irving, then still somewhat admired in the profession as a documentdigger and sort of useful devil’s advocate for Hitler, visited Toronto to kick off a North American lecture series. Zundel liked Irving’s books and greeted him at the airport: Irving recoiled in horror and asked Zundel politely to steer clear.
But Irving’s talks were poorly attended, and Zun- del used the opportunity to convince Irving that there might be a bigger audience for more strident Holocaust-minimizing views. As Irving’s life was devoured by ill- advised comments and self- destructive legal struggles in the 1990s, he came to speak of Zundel almost in the fashion of a disappointed paramour — alternately crediting him with having convinced him the Holocaust was an exaggeration, and blaming him for transforming him into a social and professional pariah.
The University of Waterloo architecture historian Robert Jan van Pelt, a leading authority on the Holocaust, tells an amazing story in his 2002 book The Case for Auschwitz. It turns out he actually met Zundel before Irving did. A group of visiting historians had come to Ontario to meet van Pelt, and someone suggested visiting Zundel on a professorial lark. They were welcomed effusively at Zundel’s basement HQ.
“Zundel talked and talked,” van Pelt recounts, calling him, “A large roguish fellow who could have been quite a pleasant companion during a night on the town — assuming that one did not understand a word he said.” After enduring Zundel’s harangue in near- silence for a while, van Pelt and the others left, passing posters for Irving’s lectures on the way out.
“In the picture Ir ving looked like a gentleman,” van Pelt observes, “and I wondered how he had gotten involved with Zundel, who seemed to relish his role as a lout and a buffoon.”
The buffoonery was probably integral to the seduct i on. Canadians will remember that Zundel was rarely photographed in this country without a hard hat. Irving, who had contended throughout his career with effete British dons, seems to have had no natural defence against a strutting, brawny alpha male who was even more the outsider- amateur than himself.
It should be remembered that by 1986 Zundel was already well on his way to establishing his place in Canadian legal history. He had already been convicted once under the Criminal Code’s “spreading false news” section, eventually struck down by the Supreme Court in 1992’ s R. v. Zundel. Free speech absolutists argued then that the legal and social pursuit of Zundel merely served to increase his notoriety.
As a purely empirical question of history, this is hard to resolve. But we know that protests and exertions of the police failed to stop Zundel from winning over Irving, and thus acquiring international influence. It may have done nothing but enhance his credentials as a pseudo-intellectual grappler, defying social scorn and the force of law.
The authorities were eventually able to bundle Zundel off to Germany through a legal door that has since closed. He was deported as an undesirable alien on the basis of a ministerial “security certificate” — not long before the Supreme Court denounced the use of secret evidence in deportation proceedings, and made such certificates harder to obtain. After Zundel’s deportation, an apparatus of progressive opposition to security certificates was quick to materialize. One cannot help wondering: if he were still alive in Canada in 2017, and the state tried to banish him, who might be out marching on his behalf, defending him as an “undocumented Canadian”?