Europe News

German Holocaust denier Rudolf jailed for 30 months

Mar 15, 2007, 16:47 GMT

Mannheim, Germany - A 42-year-old German neo-Nazi who claims the Holocaust never happened was jailed for 30 months by a court in the south-western city of Mannheim on Thursday.

At the start of his trial in November, Germar Rudolf had called the Holocaust 'a gigantic fraud.' He was last year expelled from the United States to Germany, which charged him with incitement to racial hatred.

A chemist, Rudolf has published pseudo-scientific claims that it was impossible that Zyklon-B poison was used in the gas chambers at the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp.

Denial of the Holocaust is punishable in Germany with up to five years in jail.

Last month, another US-based German neo-Nazi, Ernst Zuendel, was sentenced to five years in jail for his books and websites which contained fulsome praise of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and abuse towards Jews.

Rudolf lived in the United States after his conviction by a court in Stuttgart for inciting racial hatred in 1995 and associated with Zuendel. The United States has no laws against neo-Nazi teachings.