Up-front, please let me apologize for not using correct trial vocabulary since court protocol is very different in Germany from hearings on this continent. Also, since trial transcripts are verboten, what little information I get is second-hand and, of necessity, subjective. With this report, I am doing the best that I can.

I was told that this October 4 hearing was going to be a brief, insignificant session of a couple of hours only, dealing with administrative matters. Dr. Schaller, one of the defense attorneys who had submitted a detailed summary September 29 of the geopolitical significance of Zundel's lifelong quest for truth - " - to get to the bottom of what the heck happened at Auschwitz", as Ernst himself put it in his documentary DVD - was not going to be at this hearing, since he has to travel from Austria, an eight-hour trip each way. I did not even announce the date on the Internet, since I did not want Zundel supporters travel long distances at great expense and inconvenience to them, only to be disappointed.

As it turned out, this hearing was one of the most significant and dramatic events as yet that played in the courtroom in Mannheim. It seems that the prosecution, with Judge Meinerzhagen as its designated bottleneck, dropped all pretenses in near riotous outbursts that can only be described as bizarre, hysterical panic to keep the historical truth from coming uncorked!

Prior to this hearing, Defense Attorney Rieger had submitted a number of extensive "requests" to the court - pardon the imprecise term - asking in clear language that forensic and documentary evidence be allowed, as well as the testimony of prominent expert witnesses. I will not go into the details because the copies that I saw were in German and it is too complicated to give you a feel for what these papers summarized, other than to say that this was the first time, to my knowledge, that the defense dropped all hesitation and went on the offensive in a forceful and decisive way - a courageous strategy indeed in the wake of explicit threats to them to be charged with the same "offense" as Ernst Zundel. After all, the court intoned over and over, the Holocaust could not be anything but "self-evident" and should not, could not, and would not be put to the test!

Specifically, in reference to expert witnesses, the Zundel defense team had requested that both the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, be permitted to testify as to the harmful consequences of keeping the world in the dark by pretending the Holocaust was what it purported to be - a "fact of history" - now contested by this obstreperous Swabian in Mannheim. Several other potential expert witnesses' names were submitted who would shed light where darkness reigned, among them Fred Leuchter, the chief investigator of the dreaded "gas chambers" of Auschwitz and other major Third Reich concentration camps. One of the interesting and unknown items, for me, was a document listed that showed that Jewish factions had aborted an investigation years ago that would have more precisely determined the number of "Holocaust" victims. Another document that Attorney Rieger had either submitted previously or tried to submit at this hearing was an Open Letter by the Iranian President to Germany's Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in which the Iranian head of state shamed the German government for imprisoning Holocaust researchers in order to prevent the truth from coming out. Ahmadinejad is reported to have said, according to an interview in Germany's Der Spiegel in May of this year:

"The extortion and blackmail continue, and people are not allowed to think about or even question the source of this extortion, otherwise they face imprisonment. When will this situation end? Sixty years, one hundred years or one thousand years, when?"

I have read President Ahmadinejad's letter in both German and English translations - it is widely available on the Net and, naturally, on the Zundelsite (www.zundelsite.org) - but to my knowledge it was utterly stonewalled by Germany's mainstream press, and Chancellor Merkel had called it a "scandalous" letter she would, of course, ignore!

One of the most dramatic moments in this hearing came when Ernst Zundel decided to break his self-imposed silence and let them have it, Zundel-fashion, for the first time in more than 18 months. I never understood and was never given an adequate explanation of why he chose to remain silent for so long, but I utterly trust Ernst's political judgment - he must have had his reasons. This day, it seems, he had his fill - he stood up, dug in his heels, accused the court of shamelessly running a secret political show trial where only written submissions were allowed, to be read by the court at the exclusion of both public and press, and proceeded to read President Ahmadinejad's Open Letter right into Judge Meinerzhagen's horrified ears!

At that point, pandemonium!

Judge Meinerzhagen simply lost it - and started to scream, his hands shaking and his face distorted with fury, that this was an "impertinence" - in German, "eine Frechheit!" - that the defense was trying to pull the wool over his eyes by making the defendant the messenger of what, precisely, he had forbidden the attorneys to submit at risk of their own welfare! It seems that the verbal confrontation that ensued was the Mother of all Shouting Matches - it even worried the armed police at one point! Apparently it looked like it would come to blows!

Folks, please take this as an incomplete report that I am writing in the middle of the night, a continent away. I look at this newest twist in the dramatic Zundel Saga with both dread and elation. I will not even attempt to interpret what all this could possibly mean - let's simply say that finally it looks to me as though the German government, on its knees before Zion for more than sixty years, has lost its grip before the precipice and broadcast its own terror - of the inexorable Power of the Truth!