Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben vows to fight German charge | The Australian

The Australian, Pia Akerman | January 24, 2009

REVISIONIST commentator Fredrick Toben will fight charges of Holocaust denial in Germany within weeks of escaping extradition proceedings in London, after negotiating with German prosecutors to face a European court.

In a video posted on YouTube, Dr Toben declares he will travel to Germany to meet Mannheim prosecutor Andreas Grossman, responsible for the failed extradition case against the former Adelaide schoolteacher in Britain last year.

‘Mr Grossman, here is a message for you: that in the near future I shall be travelling to Germany, I shall be visiting you and we shall be thrashing it out in the German court,’ Dr Toben says in the video.

‘I am progressing to that next stage in our battle for truth, in our battle for civilisation, in our battle to liberate the people who are oppressed. ‘We shall see whether truth will prevail … whether we can in fact get some justice or whether you are simply going to demolish me, criminalise my thoughts and therefore further kill the German soul.’

Dr Toben, 64, declined to say when he would go to Germany when contacted by The Weekend Australian yesterday.

But he said he had already been in email contact with Mr Grossman to arrange the court proceedings.

‘I don’t like being threatened by people who say they are going to hunt me down,’ he said. ‘Let’s be civilised in these things, and discuss it and thrash it out.’

Dr Toben spent seven months in Mannheim prison in 1999 for inciting racism. He will now face up to five years in jail, with parole an unlikely prospect unless he recants his claims.

British police arrested Dr Toben last October on a plane at Heathrow airport, acting on a European Union arrest warrant issued in Germany, which accused him of publishing internet material ‘of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature’.

A British judge ruled the arrest warrant invalid, a decision Germany initially appealed against before withdrawing.

Dr Toben would not say if he had already arranged legal representation, as he will almost certainly face another jail term. ‘Nothing is ever certain, but I just don’t like this nonsense of being targeted and pulled off a plane,’ he said. ‘This is just primitive.’

In the YouTube video — where he speaks in front of Canberra’s Parliament House — Dr Toben foreshadows a visit to an upcoming revisionist conference to be held in Tehran.

He was a speaker at a similar conference organised by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian capital in 2006 that sparked strong condemnation from international leaders.

Meanwhile, a Federal Court judgment in a civil case against Dr Toben is still pending. He has pleaded not guilty to 28 charges alleging he breached orders by the Federal Court in 2002 not to publish offensive material on his website. The material breached the Racial Discrimination Act, implying that the Holocaust did not happen and doubting the existence of gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He faces a finding of criminal contempt if found guilty.