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Article from:
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/051115/w111546.html
Trial of Holocaust denier
Zundel halted after judge fires defence lawyer
09:50:52 EST Nov 15, 2005
MANNHEIM, Germany (CP) - A judge said Tuesday the trial of
Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel will be rescheduled after firing one of the
defence lawyers.
Judge Ulrich Meinerzhagen ordered Sylvia Stolz dismissed,
saying he doubted she would defend Zundel properly and that a replacement
would need time to prepare.
Meinerzhagen ordered that Zundel remain in custody but set no
date for the trial to reopen. The court also dismissed a defence motion
calling for Meinerzhagen's removal.
Zundel, 66, who was deported to his native Germany from Canada in March,
faces charges of incitement, libel and disparaging the dead before the state
court in the southwestern city of Mannheim. He faces a maximum sentence of
five years in jail if convicted.
At the opening of Zundel's trial last week, Meinerzhagen dismissed Horst
Mahler, himself a prominent far-right activist, who Stolz had wanted as her
assistant.
The judge said Stolz, one of Zundel's four lawyers, may have committed an
offence herself by allowing Mahler to help prepare the defence's case.
Mahler is barred from practising as a lawyer because of a conviction
earlier this year for incitement over the distribution of anti-Semitic
propaganda.
A prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier since the late 1970s,
Zundel ran Samisdat Publishers, a leading distributor of Nazi propaganda
based in Canada.
He also provides content to The Zundelsite website, which has followers
around the world - hundreds of whom have demonstrated against his detention
in Germany.
Born in Germany in 1939, Zundel emigrated to Canada in 1958 and lived in
Toronto and Montreal until 2001. Canadian officials rejected his attempts to
obtain citizenship in 1966 and 1994.
He then moved to Tennessee, where he married fellow extremist Ingrid
Rimland, but was deported to Canada in 2003 for alleged immigration
violations.
Upon arrival in Toronto, Zundel was arrested and held in detention until
a judge ruled in March that his activities posed a threat to national and
international security, and he was deported to Germany. The decision was
welcomed by Jewish and anti-Nazi groups in Canada and elsewhere.
German authorities accuse Zundel of decades of anti-Semitic activities,
including repeated denials of the Holocaust - a crime in Germany - in
documents and on the Internet.
Their 20-page indictment cites Zundel's texts dating from 1999 to 2003,
which prosecutors say demonstrate his attempts "in a pseudo-scientific way,
to relieve National Socialism of the stain of the murder of the Jews."
Zundel says he is a peaceful man and that Canadian and German officials
have combined to deny him his right to free speech.
© The Canadian Press, 2005
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