The foundation for Zundel's case against the Holocaust, a systematic extermination of Jews with poison gas, conventional weapons, carbon dioxide, et al, perpetrated by Germans during the Second World War, appears vested in what he percieves as Israeli use of the tragedy to leverage a current political agenda. This case is detailed at the very beginning of his online course, Holocaust Revisionism 101, on the Zundel website.

"The U.S. government has recognized and subsidized the State of Israel for more than 50 years. According to an article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1996. p. 44, America has spent more than $5 billion in one year alone in direct and indirect aid. That is almost 13.5 million a day - 365 days a year! Why? Because the "Holocaust" is claimed to have been a factual historical occurrence, commonly called "genocide" targeting Jews,and thus entitling Israel to special consideration and protection amongnations."

In order to remove percieved leverage, Zundel has joined ranks with a loose knit group of Holocaust revisionists whose mission is to either disprove or minimize the genocide in Europe.¹ Tactics employed by this group in its effort to reduce the Holocaust to myth have taken form in a sort of historical knit-picking. Time, proximity and humans have been known to obscure facts. It is not possible to possess the knowledge of all the details of a given event. Surrounded by a forest of evidence which demonstrates the occurance of genocide in Europe, the revisionists have sought to pick at the bark of individual trees. They pick at the those small unknown fragments while they ignore the mountains of fact.

They cite the lack of a signed order by Hitler or lack of an "official" state policy to eradicate the Jews as evidence that the Holocaust did not occur. The very nature of genocide makes it impossible to caculate an exact total of victims. Given that the sum of victims is at best an estimate, the revisionists have provided their own figures which are considerably smaller than traditional totals. And the victims are portrayed not as such but more as collateral damage. They play games with logistics to cast doubt on the probability of implementing genocide.² Zundel continues to claim that Zyklon B would jeopardize the health of the German perpetrators, therefore they would not have used it to gas Jews. Although he does concede it was used as a delousing agent. This claim remains on his website yet its leading proponent was left with egg on his face while defending it in Zundel's criminal defense trial in 1991.

Ernst Zundel's most significant contribution to Holocaust denial lies in the fact that he was able to amass $30,000.00 dollars. In 1989, this contribution culminated in The Leuchter Report. Financed by Zundel, Fred Leuchter traveled to Poland to perform analysis on brick and mortor samples taken from the "alleged" gas chambers of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Birkenau. Since Leuchter was unable to find traces of Zyklon B on any of the samples, he concluded that they "could not have then been, or now, be utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers."³

The lack of an engineering degree did not deter Leuchter from claiming that title and he traveled to Poland as part of a tour in order to steal some brick samples for analysis. While touring the camps, Leuchter slipped off and chipped a few bricks away. He returned from Poland with his rock chips and had them analyzed by a lab in the United States. The deniers had their bombshell. The lab was unable to detect any traces of Zyklon B.

But this should not come as a surprise. As the Russians approached the death camps in January 1945, the German overlords destroyed the gas chambers with explosives as they retreated to the West. The gas chambers have since been rebuilt as part of the museum with various materials -- some new, some original, but exposed for some time to the elements. Given Leuchter's "methodology," there is no certainty that he even examined original materials let alone bricks which faced inside the chambers. And if he did, those which he did examine had been exposed to weather.

Since it was originally published, The Leuchter Report has caused a stir. The internet abounds with conversations by partisans whose arguments concern the legitimacy of this paper. With the engagement of people in these types of debates, the Holocaust deniers have managed to cast some doubt (the degree of which depends upon whom is asked) as to the occurance of a Jewish genocide in Europe during the 1940s. And by doing so, they've managed to alieviate themselves of responsibility for an alternative model which explains all the known evidence in such a matter that the current model of systematic genocide (by gas and guns) is refuted while their alternate proposal remains in tact. Instead they sit in the back and demand recognition and debate, yet all they do is hurl spit balls from afar.