Abstract
While the Holocaust did not play the same pivotal role in Canada that it did in Germany, this did not prevent the highly publicized Zundel case from generating a scandal. Although it ended with a guilty verdict, the eight-week trial saw Canadian newspapers run a series of headlines that seemed to cast doubt on the Holocaust. Headlines such as “Women Dined and Danced at Auschwitz, Expert Witness Says,” made Canada, in the words of McGill law professor Irwin Coder, “the international centerpiece of Holocaust denial litigation.”1 Despite the guilty verdict, R. v. Zundel was, in the eyes of many, a symbolic victory for the accused.
Keywords
Legal System Jewish Community Holocaust Survivor Trial Judge Guilty Verdict
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Notes
- 1.Irwin Coder, “Response to the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals: An Emergent Mythology and Its Antidote,” in Irwin Colter ed., Nuremberg Forty Years Later: The Struggle Against Injustice in Our Time (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 73–86, 83. The headline appeared in the Globe and Mail on February 13, 1985.Google Scholar
- 10.Evelyn Kallen and Lawrence Lam, “Target for Hate: The Impact of the Zundel and Keegstra Trials on a Jewish-Canadian Audience,” in Canadian Ethnic Studies 25(1) (1993): 9–24.Google Scholar
- 18.H. Silverman, “The Trial Judge, Pilot, Participant, or Umpire,” Alberta Law Review 11 (1973): 40–64, 64.Google Scholar
- 19.Peter Russell, “Judicial Power in Canada’s Political Culture,” in M.L. Friedland ed., Courts and Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 75–88, 84.Google Scholar
- 52.Leonidas E. Hill, “Revisionism and the Law in Canada,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 6 (1989): 214, n.46Google Scholar
- 54.Keegstra had been dismissed from his teaching post in 1983 after a well-publicized controversy. David Bercuson and Douglas Wertheimer, A Trust Betrayed: The Keegstra Affair (Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1985).Google Scholar
- 59.Nor is Adams’ criticism of Christie’s trial strategy as bad lawyering any more convincing. In challenging the Holocaust, Christie followed the wishes of his client, who cared less about the legal verdict and more about making full use of the propaganda opportunities raised by the trial. Under these circumstances, Christie’s lawyering was “good” to the extent it succeeded in forcing the court to focus attention on Holocaust denial. Nor is this rare. During the late 1960s Americans protesting against the war in Vietnam used similar tactics. See Steven E. Barkan, Protesters on Trial: Criminal Justice in the Southern Civil Rights and Vietnam Antiwar Movements (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
- 65.Michael Mandel, The Charter of Rights and the Legalization of Politics in Canada (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing Inc., 1994), 369.Google Scholar
- 66.Joel Bakan, Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 96.Google Scholar
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© Robert A. Kahn 2004