Holocaust denying Bishop Richard Williamson did not attend on Monday his appeal session at the German district court of Regensburg on Monday. His lawyers made several excuses, but prosecutors showed a consistent pattern and demanded his penalty be raised.
Last year, the 71-year-old bishop was tried by a first instance following a televised interview in which he denied the mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis in World War II. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.
In April 2010, the District Court of Regensburg convicted him for a "hate crime" and fined him with of €10,000. Both the prosecution and Williamson filed an appeal.
The Regensburg Justice has the jurisdiction to try Williamson because the interview was given in the Pius Seminary in nearby Zaitzkofen, Germany. In 2008, Williamson was interviewed by a crew from a Swedish television station there, during which he cast doubt on the historical facts of the Holocaust. The interview was aired in Sweden in January 2009.
Like most Holocaust deniers, Williamson tried to sound reasonable, did not deny Jews were mass murdered but merely tried to limit the extent of the genocide (from 6 million to 2-3 hundred thousand), and – most importantly – repeated the “Big Lie” when he made the absurd claim that ‘there is no historical evidence for the existence of the gas chambers’.
The use of gas chambers by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews has repeatedly been confirmed by sources including the Vrba-Wetzler report, German soldiers, and testimony from Rudolf Höss, Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, not to mention Jewish survivors and Allied troops who liberated (and filmed) the concentration camps.
However, as the years go by and first hand eyewitnesses die out, pro-Nazi revisionists increasingly try to deny the existence of the gas chambers, making the outrageous claim of “no evidence” and constantly repeating discredited “scientific reports” denying them in an effort to gain public acceptance of them as an alternate viewpoint, and not as sheer fabrication.
Williamson's lawyer claimed on Monday that his client should get an acquittal because his comments, although made on German soil, were supposedly not intended for broadcast in Germany. Williamson's attorney had said earlier that his client assumed that the broadcast of the interview will be only in Sweden, where such statements are exempt from punishment. Williamson and the lawyer were apparently feigning a lack of knowledge of how the internet and YouTube work. When he learned about the German decision to prosecute him the bishop reportedly said: "I should have known it."
The Bishop’s lawyer also claimed that the reporters had baited and entrapped the Bishop into making the statements.
The prosecution, on the other hand, claimed during the hearing on Monday that the Bishop’s views were not off-hand remarks but rather part of a long-established pattern, showing that he had already expressed such Holocaust denial views in the late 1980s in Canada.
The prosecution demanded that the fine he was given be raised to 12,000 Euros.
Bishop Williamson is a member of the ultra-conservative Society of Pius X (also known as the Pius Brotherhood), which objects to the changes made in the Catholic Church over the past half century.
The brotherhood is known for its virulent anti-Semitic attitudes, and has been opposed to the reconciliation between the Church and the Jews under the leadership of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Banished from the Church for a long time, the bishop had his excommunication from the Catholic Church lifted by Pope Benedict XVI at the same time that the sordid interview was broadcast, raising a storm of protest and a clarification from the Pope that he had been unaware and that he in no way endorsed the bishop’s Holocaust denying.
Among the members of the brotherhood who voiced their support for the bishop was Franco Damiani, the Italian high school teacher who sued parents for objecting to his attempt to teach Holocaust denial and to spread religious chauvinism in class.
