Neo-Nazi fugitive from Germany surfaces in Britain four years later

LONDON, Oct. 19 (JTA) – A neo-Nazi activist who fled Germany in 1995 after being sentenced to 14 months in prison for inciting racial hatred has been found hiding in Britain. Germar Rudolf faces two additional Holocaust denial charges in Germany, and the chairman of the London-based Holocaust Educational Trust, Lord Janner, urged the German authorities to seek his extradition immediately. “The sooner he is out of this country the better,” Janner said. A hero in the international neo-Nazi movement, Rudolf, 34, has been living in a succession of sleepy towns in southern England under his former wife’s maiden name, Scheerer. According to reports, he first fled from his home in Germany to Spain, where he stayed with his patron, former Nazi Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who put down the 1944 attempted putsch against Hitler. However, Rudolf decided to move on when he suspected that the German authorities had discovered his Spanish hideout and he arrived in Britain in 1996. Since then, he told a London newspaper that tracked him down over the weekend, he has been working “as a Holocaust revisionist 24 hours a day.” His work has brought him into contact with far-right political groups and with Holocaust revisionist historian David Irving. He has also received visits from family and friends in Germany, who have remained tight-lipped about his whereabouts, and he has continued propagating his views via the Internet. Rudolf insisted in the newspaper interview that he was “not a total apologist for the Nazis, like a lot of people who support my work.” He said he considered himself to be a “political prisoner” in Germany and had fled to Britain “because I wanted to be free.” Rudolf first attracted public attention in 1993 when Remer circulated material on Auschwitz from Rudolf’s doctoral thesis to leading German opinion-makers. In the uproar that followed, Rudolf was branded a neo-Nazi, expelled from his university and indicted on three counts of inciting racial hatred. Rudolf’s appearance has fueled new calls for the introduction of legislation in Britain to outlaw Holocaust denial, a step that several British governments have declined to take.