One Week in Cyberspace the World Will Not Forget

My name is Ernst Zündel. I am a
Holocaust Revisionist. I dare to think and express forbidden thoughts.

More to the point, I want to know: "Did Six Million Really Die?"

Five words. One little question mark.

I am the cause of the first-time-ever censorship ban on the Net. I need
not repeat details here. The German act of censorship - first CompuServe, then
Telekom - brought forth a reaction the likes of which happens to dissidents
only in Hollywood movies.

And all because of one small sentence
followed by a question mark? I'm asking it again: "Did Six Million Really
Die?"

Not many people ask the questions I have asked for a good part of my life -
questions pertaining to the Holocaust. I didn't until I was well into my
twenties.

One day I decided I should.

I was like everybody else in my own
postwar years in Germany. I was disgusted with my father's generation whom I
believed to have been monsters. Like practically all people on our planet, I
used to believe in the standard, widely accepted notion that the government of
National Socialist Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, had attempted
to kill the Jews by an act of state-decreed genocide. I was ashamed to be a
German and turned to Canada.

In the 1960's, newly married to a
French-Canadian woman and with a young family to support, I experienced my first
doubts about some details of the Holocaust story. Further study, mostly at
night, convinced me that many segments of the story were highly exaggerated, and
the number of Jewish losses were wildly inflated.

As time went on, my
soul was burning with one question: "Did Six Million Really Die?"

Soon I
spoke and wrote about my doubts about some aspects of the Holocaust at public
gatherings and private meetings to attentive audiences. I produced some fliers,
handbills, posters and stickers. I did some radio interviews.

Then fate
would have it that I published one small booklet someone else had written - a
publication that had been an underground bestseller in 12 languages and had been
sold in 18 countries. Its title was: "Did Six Million Really Die?"

It
posed some pointed questions. I felt safe publishing it, since nowhere had this
publication caused offense.

Not so in Canada.

A woman called
Sabina Citron, who headed the Holocaust Remembrance Association of Toronto,
Ontario, Canada, decided that she was offended. She laid a private criminal
complaint under Canada's ancient "False News" Law against me in November of
1983. This was a law used seven centuries ago against the British peasants who
had offended kings by chanting limericks.

Next thing I knew, the government of Canada took over and started
prosecuting me. The media was vociferous. The mob was mobilized. I was
beaten and spat at on the way to court. My house was bombed in the middle of
the night. I was convicted by two juries and lost some of my appeals. I went
to prison more than once. My thriving graphic arts business was soon ruined.
My marriage broke under the stress and ended in divorce. I was banned from
traveling to the United States because I was before the courts of Canada.

Between trials and appeals the judges imposed what the "Globe and
Mail" of Toronto called ". . . the most sweeping judicial gag order ever
imposed on a Canadian resident," thus depriving me of my freedom of speech for
almost nine years. The German government refused to issue me a passport or
travel document for over 6 years, forcing me into a form of Gulag existence
without barbed wire. My bank accounts were seized. Huge early morning raids
were taking place all over Germany against my supporters there.

Yet
still, my soul was burning with the question: "Did Six Million Really Die?"

I was a German. Like any other human being on this earth, I loved my people
and my country. I loved them more as I matured politically. Why was I not
allowed to question my own people's history? Just who was writing the script of
what I should or should not ask?

On August 27, 1992, the Supreme Court
of Canada ruled that the ancient "False News" statute, under which I had been
dragged through the courts for nine years and which cost me most of my fortune
and the tax payers of Canada some $6 million, was unconstitutional.

Ernst Zundel holding Supreme Court Ruling in his
favour

I thought that surely now I had the right to ask: "Did Six Million Really
Die?"

I asked. It hurt to ask - but I asked.

The public
vilification in the media increased. Official persecution through arbitrary
searches, seizures of books, mail etc., pointedly thorough customs and
immigration inspections at the border, and police investigations by three
different police forces and Canada's spy agency, CSIS, followed.

I
protested publicly and privately to every level of government. Writers
organizations and Amnesty International turned deaf ears to my pleas. I appealed
to the various human rights agencies and international bodies. No one helped. No
one cared.

Politicians, columnists, and broadcasters agitated the public
against me to the point when on May 7, 1995 an arsonist set my house on fire and
nearly succeeded in burning it down. I have been told by tipsters he was paid
$200 to do so.

....

Over 5,000 rare books, manuscripts, files and business records were destroyed
by fire and water damage. Had I been home, I would have been killed.

Mail Bomb sent to Ernst Zundel

One week later a powerful parcel bomb was sent to me which, had I opened it,
would have killed me and my staff.

It was becoming ever more clear to me
that Canada, supposedly a fine democracy, did not allow my question.

Because of the persecution I experienced for expressing my unorthodox
viewpoint on history, I decided with the help of some American friends to set up
a world-wide web page in the USA, the last bastion of free speech. I quietly set
about constructing my web page.

At first, I was more or less left alone
and ignored.

Only when Nizkor, a Holocaust Promotion
web site, challenged me to refute a lengthy, 170+ page, double-spaced
document in rebuttal to one of my posts on the Zundelsite and I prepared to do
so by heaving some documents onto my site,
did it become clear that I was upsetting powerful interests the world over.

A ban by the German censors on my server was imposed. 1,500 web sites
were inaccessible in Germany because of five small words, still followed by a
question mark. Did Six Million
Really Die?

But then the incredible happened! Under vicious
political siege, my web site was cloning itself!

For an entire week,
from Patagonia to the Northern Polar Regions, from China to the Cape of Good
Hope, the click of the mouse was the roar of the lion that roared: "Hands off the
Internet!"

A friend said that he felt the planet lurch.

Censorship busters materialized from nowhere and sprang up like mushrooms
after rain. University students, computer buffs, Internet veterans and
columnists all leaped to my defense. The phones kept ringing off the hooks. The
fax machines went crazy. The mailman groaned under the load of conventional
mail, and so much e-mail arrived that we were overwhelmed. Total strangers, who
under normal circumstances would have never heard of me, much less supported me,
spontaneously copied or mirrored my web site and e-mailed large portions of text
files all over the world.

At the height of the controversy, at least 13 identified mirror web sites
existed in the USA and, we were told, at least one in Australia.

An outcast had become an incast.

That miracle in cyberspace will be forever
cyber-history. It was magnificent!

I am on record saying that freedom does not come for free. I of all
people know that questions do not come for free. Doubting the Holocaust is
against the law in Germany. In Europe, there are "hate laws," and the
Holocaust is entrenched dogma before which people genuflect.

There are 1300 state prosecutors all over Germany. I am undoubtedly
registered as a "thought criminal" in every one of them and thus will be
arrested, tried and convicted of thought crimes, should I ever step on German
soil again. My 90-year-old mother passed away, and I was not allowed to see her
to her grave.

The same fate - arrest, conviction and imprisonment for thought crimes -
could befall the idealistic American Censorship Busters who gave my thoughts
refuge when my web site was under attack. Most did not even like me, but they
knew from healthy instinct that something had sprung for their jugular vein,
and that it was time to stand tall and be counted. For a week, they were men
who acted like men. They do not know this yet, but they, too, were committing
"thought crimes". All over Germany.

It is a chilling thing to have to tell those idealistic censorship busters
that this one day of bedrock principle in cyberspace could cost them up to five
years in a German prison. It is known to have happened before.

What
price freedom? What price America?