SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) — A revisionist historian living in Australia has vowed to travel to Germany to test whether his Holocaust denial views are criminal.
Dr. Fredrick Toben, the founder of the notorious Adelaide Institute, was imprisoned in London for more than one month last year before a British judge ruled invalid the arrest warrant from German prosecutors who wanted to charge him with Holocaust denial.
In a video posted on YouTube, Toben stood in front of Parliament House in Canberra and promised to challenge in court Andreas Grossman, the Mannheim prosecutor who brought the case against him last year.
“In the near future I shall be traveling to Germany,” he said. “We shall see whether truth will prevail … whether we can in fact get some justice or whether you are simply going to criminalize my thoughts and therefore further kill the German soul.”
Toben, 64, also hinted that he would again participate in an upcoming Holocaust denial conference in Iran, which he said would help “liberate people who are oppressed by the Holocaust ideology."
In 1999, Toben was imprisoned for seven months in Germany, where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in jail. He is still awaiting the verdict of a contempt-of-court case brought by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which accuses Toben of continuing to publish anti-Semitic material on his Web site. In 2002, a federal court judge ordered Toben to remove all anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial material.
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