15 November 2006
The trial of an alleged Holocaust denier deported by the United States has begun in Germany. Germar Rudolf, 42, claimed in a 1991 article that the Nazis had not used poison gas to murder Jews at Auschwitz. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted of "representing the Holocaust as a myth" and disturbing the peace of the dead. As the trial began in Mannheim, the defendant, a chemist who testified on behalf of British Holocaust denier David Irving, called the Holocaust a "gigantic fraud." Rudolf was already to 14 months by a German court in 1995 for Holocaust denial, but fled the country afterwards. He applied to the United States for political asylum in 2000, was rejected and deported in November 2005 to serve the sentence.
