Ernst Zundel Deported from Canada, Charged in Germany

After he moved to Canada in 1958 to escape military service in his homeland of Germany, neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel pained the government of his adopted country by establishing Toronto as the base of operations for Samisdat Publishing.

Zundel's firm eventually grew into one of the largest international distributors of Nazi memorabilia and Holocaust-denial propaganda, including texts authored by Zundel like Did Six Million Really Die? and The Hitler We Loved and Why.

Zundel also turned his home, in the words of a Canadian federal court, into "a revolving door for leaders of white supremacist groups with histories of violence."

On March 1, culminating years of conflict with the government, Canada finally gave Zundel the boot, deporting him back to Germany. German officials promptly arrested him for past incitement of racial hatred by disseminating banned materials to Germany via the mails and the Internet from Canada.

Zundel had lived in Canada for nearly five decades, but authorities there never granted his repeated citizenship applications. Frustrated, he moved to the United States in 2000 hoping to obtain U.S. citizenship, but failed there as well. He was arrested in 2003 in Tennessee for overstaying his visa and returned to Canada. There, he was immediately jailed under an anti-terrorism law passed during his absence.

Zundel spent the next two years in solitary confinement fighting a legal battle to avoid deportation to his native country. In late February, Canadian Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais ruled that Zundel could reasonably be deemed a threat to national security, thereby making him subject to immediate deportation.

In his blistering 63-page decision, Justice Blais called Zundel a racist hypocrite who claimed to be a pacifist while actually working to support groups abroad that seek "the destruction of governments and multicultural societies."