German neo-Nazi jailed for denying Holocaust
(Adds quotes and more details)
KARLSRUHE, Germany, April 21 (Reuter) – A German court
sentenced a leading neo-Nazi on Friday to two years in jail for
inciting racial hatred and denying the existence of the
Holocaust.
Judge Eva-Maria Wollentin said Guenter Deckert, leader of
the far-right National Democratic Party, had shown no regrets
after his conviction on the charges and had made it clear that
he would repeat his views again.
In a sign that German courts may now be taking a harder line
on Nazi apologists, she told Deckert after a nine-hour hearing
that he would not be allowed to get away with such offences in
future.
Deckert was convicted for organising a lecture in 1991 in
which he and U.S. engineer Fred Leuchter claimed it was
impossible that six million Jews were killed in Nazi
concentration camps in World War Two.
“(Deckert) has blackened the memory of countless Jews who
were murdered in the gas chambers,” Wollentin said. She said
his behaviour had been particularly reckless when he dismissed
the Holocaust as a “Jewish lie.”
About 20 Deckert sympathisers were present in the regional
court in Karlsruhe and he said after its ruling: “That which
does not kill us makes us harder.”
He can appeal to the Federal Court of Justice, Germany’s
highest civil and criminal court, against the two-year jail
sentence.
A court in Mannheim had imposed one-year suspended prison
sentence on him last year, a decision which sparked protests in
Germany and abroad that it was too lenient.
Protesters also claimed that the Mannheim judges appeared to
sympathise with Deckert’s anti-semitic sentiments.
The Federal Court of Justice overturned the sentence and
ordered the regional court in Karlsruhe to set a new one.
A month later the German parliament passed a law making the
“Holocaust lie,” as denial of the Nazi genocide is known in
Germany, a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.
Last year a court in the Bavarian capital Munich jailed a
prominent neo-Nazi leader for 18 months for the offence. It
convicted Bela Ewald Althans of distributing videos that denied
the Holocaust took place.
