IT is a fact, as David Irving has proved, that at least 125,000 German civilians were burned to death by the Allies in the firebombing of Dresden, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities before WWII. It is also a fact that the bombing served no strategic or military purpose whatsoever, for neither did the city. Therefore, that the Dresden firebombing was a “crime against humanity” should go without saying. History, however, is written by the victors of wars, and all too often fact has the tendency to become fiction and fiction has the tendency to become fact, as demonstrated by British journalist Oliver Kramm in his latest article for the Times Online. Unfavourable death tolls are either divided by five or multiplied by 10. We arrive with uncanny ease at the conclusion that there were “25,000 fatalities” as opposed to 125,000 victims, and anything to the contrary is considered to lack “evidential basis” and to be a “consistent and deliberate falsification of the historical evidence”. We are told that “responsible historians” would never…

Free speech martyr Ernst Zundel has been released from the German gulag after serving a five-year sentence for denying the Jewish holocaust. Prior to his extradition to Germany in 2005, the Canadian government had deemed Zundel “a threat to national security” and imprisoned him for two years without actually pressing any formal charges. In total, then, Zundel served seven years in prison for the spoken and written word. During his imprisonment, he was denied parole and it was made sure that he would serve out his entire sentence, despite his age and his exemplary behaviour. By comparison, we have rapists and other violent convicts, genuine threats to society, who are often granted parole after serving a mere two or three years of their sentence.