Holocaust denier arrested

Searchlight, September 2005

Flemish Holocaust Denier, Siegfried Verbeke, was arrested at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on 3 August under an international arrest warrant issued last year in Germany where he is wanted for Holocaust denial and writing internet articles on the subject. Verbeke was convicted in Belgium for Holocaust Denial last April, given a year in prison and fined € 2500 (approx £ 1,800).

Germany, which last year unsuccessfully demanded Verbeke's extradition from Belgium, will now ask the Dutch authorities for extradition. However, the Belgian justice authorities reportedly want to try him again.

Verbeke could also face prosecution in the Netherlands. In 2003, the Anne Frank Foundation and the CIDI (Centre Information and Documentation Israel) filed a complaint against Verbeke for internet publications by his Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (Free Historical Research).

Verbeke has collected and published writings denying the Holocaust and pleading for Nazi war criminals for 30 years now. On his large website, hosted by the convicted German chemist Germar Rudolf, he publishes this filth in four different languages.

Verbeke became a public figure in 1977 when, together with the later Vlaams Blok ideologist and antisemite Roeland Raes, he founded the Flemish revisionist Magazine Haro.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Verbeke distributed pamphlets in the Netherlands to people with presumed Jewish names and, in 1994, circulated a booklet by Rudolf, denying that Jews were gassed, to hundreds of Dutch schools, libraries and newspapers. In 1995, he was convicted and fined by a court in The Hague. Later, he hit the headlines by trying to get political asylum in the Netherlands because he was banned from spreading his lies in Belgium.

By Jeroen Bosch of Alert! and Antifa-Net in Utrecht