Los Angeles, CA (2/12/05)--Weaving stories of her own flight from a
war-torn Mennonite colony into a defense of her embattled husband Ernst
Zundel, novelist Ingrid Rimland warned a California audience on
February 3 that "what plagued us then in Russia...has now come to
America. It's here now."
Rimland was in southern California to speak at a conference of the
Institute for Historical Review prior to taking part in a demonstration
in downtown Los Angeles the following day on behalf of her husband, a
controversial publisher and activist who has been held in a Toronto
prison for almost two years, on charges that he is a threat to the
national security of Canada. Demonstrators rallied at Canadian
consulates in several U.S. cities February 4 to call for Zundel's
release.
Zundel, an avowed pacifist with no criminal record in either Canada or
the U.S., was living peacefully in Tennessee with Rimland after their
marriage in 2000, until federal authorities effectively kidnapped him
at his home using an expired immigration law, says Bruce Leichty,
Clovis, California. Leichty, who has been representing the Zundels in a
federal court proceeding in Tennessee since September 2004, joined
Rimland at the Los Angeles rally 2/4.
Rimland told her California audience that her father had been taken
away by Stalinist police in a similar manner in front of her when she
was a child. "It was like a nightmare that happened to me 60 years ago,
and it happened again." She never saw her father again, and fears that
the same will be true of her husband.
Zundel is currently awaiting a decision in his national security case
from a Canadian judge--who used to represent Canada's intelligence
service--which would likely mean that he will be deported from Canada
to Germany where he faces criminal penalties for his speech.
Her husband, a native of Germany, dares to speak of his own experience
arising out of World War II and to challenge the prevailing historical
orthodoxy, which makes him unpopular, says Rimland. "Why are we not
allowed to talk about this? Why is it so terrible that there are people
who say, the war that has been told to America is not the war we
experienced?"
Zundel's most controversial claim has been that accounts of gas
chambers in WWII concentration camps are part of a successful
propaganda hoax. Zundel believes he incurred the lasting wrath of an
international bloc of Jewish lobbyists and government officials by
presenting expert testimony on that and other subjects during two
trials in Canada, where he lived for several decades prior to coming to
the United States and marrying Rimland. He and Rimland say that most of
the Jews and others who died in the camps did so from disease and
starvation near the end of the war.
Rimland noted that she herself took a "politically incorrect" position
in her novel The Wanderers, published in 1977, when she wrote that the
German Army had been heroes to the Mennonite community, offering them
safety from a Communist reign of terror. That novel, emerging from her
experience and from research she did at the Mennonite Library and
Archives at North Newton, Kansas, won California's Best Fiction award
for 1977. But "nobody ever called me names...[until] I met Ernst
Zundel, that's when the story changed."
In her California presentation February 3, Rimland spoke
autobiographically about surviving a forest massacre by Russian troops
in postwar Germany, to which she and her mother and grandmother had
fled; about her life as a "survivor" in the Volendam Mennonite colony
in Paraguay; and about how her "prudish" inability to talk about
breast-feeding her firstborn in the Paraguayan jungle ultimately led to
medical malpractice resulting in her son's brain damage, which in turn
propelled her to North America in search of expert medical help.
She spoke of her quest to find her exiled father in Siberia and her
discovery that he had started a new family after he was told that his
wife and child had perished. She read lines from a recent letter sent
by her half-sister, now resettled in Germany, who wrote that politics
is "frightening" and that she would rather not know about the
activities of Ernst Zundel "so I can sleep at night."
Rimland was invited to speak in numerous Mennonite communities and in
other settings after writing The Wanderers, but she says that all
changed after she became an outspoken "revisionist." During the last
decade she has run a website called the Zundelsite, starting with
materials published by Ernst Zundel such as "Did Six Million Really
Die," but now she says she is trying to reach out to Americans of
various persuasions who are not revisionists but who nevertheless "are
beginning to realize they're losing their country."
"Truth is truth. Lies are lies," she told her audience. "It doesn't matter if the truth is suppressed, it's still the truth."
She and Leichty are to speak at a student-sponsored event on the campus
of the University of Colorado at Boulder February 17 at which
controversial professor Ward Churchill is also slated to speak.
Churchill made national headlines in January for an essay which he
wrote in which he called victims of the World Trade Center bombings in
September 2001 "military targets" and "little Eichmanns."
Leichty says that not only has Zundel been thwarted during his Canadian
trial by not being allowed to know the charges against him, but that it
has been also difficult making headway on Zundel's claims of government
misconduct in the U.S. judicial system. After a Knoxville federal judge
initially threw out Zundel's claim, the Court of Appeals in Cincinnati
reversed that decision and sent the case back to Knoxville, but the
same federal judge has now ruled that he lacks even the authority to
review the Attorney General's decision to arrest and deport Zundel.
Despite hearing testimony and argument about the unprecedented seizure
of Zundel and of the expiration of the law under which Zundel was
seized, the judge tried to "wash his hands" of the case at trial held
in November 2004, says Leichty, by openly stating he wanted a higher
court to rule on the legal questions in the case.
Zundel's adversaries call him a "Holocaust denier" and say that he
preaches anti-semitism and white supremacy--charges he denies. In an
FBI report on Zundel released under the Freedom of Information Act,
says Leichty, an FBI agent concluded that Zundel was not a security
threat and that Zundel would probably succeed in getting U.S. permanent
residence as a result of his marriage to a U.S. citizen, and the agent
recommended closing the FBI's file. Several months later, however,
Zundel was arrested at his home and has been jailed ever since.
"What Zundel experienced was a shocking violation of established
immigration law and procedure, made all the more alarming because it
was clearly motivated by a desire to suppress his right to free speech
and to punish freedom of conscience," says Leichty. Leichty, who has
practiced law in California since 1987, says he first met Rimland in
the 1980's through a mutual interest in Paraguayan Mennonites and their
ties to National Socialism, at a time when "Nazi hunter" Simon
Wiesenthal was charging that Mennonite colonies had sheltered Nazi
doctor Josef Mengele. At that time Rimland shared with Leichty her
criticism of a doctor in the Volendam colony who she believed was
Mengele, but who was using a different name and performing unnecessary
surgeries.
Leichty met Zundel for the first time when he was asked to testify
about the immigration irregularities in Zundel's case at Zundel's
Canadian national security trial in the summer of 2003. Among the
irregularities Leichty noted were the absence of two letters written by
Zundel's attorney in the official U.S. INS file, and the failure of INS
to notify Rimland or Zundel at the time that Rimland's application for
her husband was supposedly deemed "abandoned." Leichty testified that
Zundel and Rimland and their prior immigration attorney had
scrupulously complied with U.S. law in their application for his
permanent resident status.
Rimland pointed out at the Tennessee trial in November 2004 that she
had lived under four dictators and had always believed that the United
States was a nation of "laws, not men." But that belief is being sorely
tested by the treatment that Zundels have suffered in both the United
States and Canada, says Leichty, and "what makes Zundel's claims
against the U.S. all the more disturbing is that they have been almost
totally ignored by media in the U.S." Zundel's national security trial
in Toronto received limited coverage in Canada, but the Toronto Globe
and Mail recently editorialized against the national security
proceeding used against Zundel, which gives government ministers
unprecedented power, including the ability to use secret evidence and
testimony, and results in a judgment which is not appealable.
The Associated Press did cover the most recent demonstration held in
Los Angeles, where shouting counter-protestors carrying Jewish Defense
League signs were kept apart from Zundel supporters by a double column
of Los Angeles police.
"Regardless of what one may think of his views, Ernst Zundel is a
modern-day martyr for his beliefs, and all persons of conscience
throughout North America should be troubled," Leichty says.
Good Information Advocates
Post Office Box 7655
Fresno, CA 93747
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