It’s all happening in Europe!!!

First Ernie’s trial gets delayed cos his defence put another nazi on the case…

From CBC World News:

Trial of Holocaust denier Zundel halted after judge fires defence lawyer.

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.

And then holocaust-denier David Irving gets chucked in the cool room:

From the BBC:

Austria holds ‘Holocaust denier’

British revisionist historian David Irving is being held in Austria under laws against denying the Holocaust.

An interior ministry spokesman said police in the province of Styria acted on a warrant issued in 1989 to arrest him last Friday.

Mr Irving was on his way to give a lecture in the capital, Vienna.

In his books, Mr Irving has argued that the scale of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in World War II has been exaggerated.

He also claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.

He told a libel hearing in London in 2000 that there had been no gas chambers at the Auschwitz camp.

He lost the case and the judge branded him “an active Holocaust denier”.

‘Anti-Semitic’

A spokesman for the Austrian interior ministry, Rudolf Gollia, told the BBC that Mr Irving was first taken to the town of Graz, but was now in custody in Vienna.

Anti-Nazi groups in the UK congratulated the Austrian government.

The chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, Lord Greville Janner, said he hoped the move would “lead to a successful prosecution”.

The head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said denial was not a matter of opinion.

“Austrian law demands incisive action to protect its citizens from a repeat of the past,” he added.

Mr Irving was previously arrested in Austria in 1984.

This time, the historian was stopped near the town of Hartberg while reportedly on his way to address a students’ club in Vienna.

Mr Irving came into the spotlight in 2000 when he sued US academic Deborah Lipstadt for describing him as a “Holocaust denier” in her 1994 work Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Giving his verdict, the British judge said Mr Irving was “an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism”.

Not a good week to be a nazi in der fatherland, is it?