Ernst Zündel: His Struggle, His Life

 

 

 

1939-1958 - Childhood and Youth

 

Ernst Zündel was born on April 24, 1939 in Calmbach in the Black Forest, Germany, the fourth of six children of lumberjack Fritz Zündel and his wife, Gertrud Zündel, nee Meyer, who came from the Augsburg region. From 1938 to 1947, his father, a confirmed Social-Democrat, was in the military as a medic - first on the front and then in American captivity. His mother was a devout Christian.

 

World War II and its dreadful aftermath for Germany made a lasting impression on the little boy, especially the Allied bombing attacks and the aggravating and dangerous strafing attacks of the fighter bombers, called Jabos, which attacked everything in Germany that moved in the fields, forests and meadows and on the roads and rails. Added to this was the hunger, the cold and the bitter privation following Germany's collapse.

 

Zündel's first school days found him in the basement of his home town's Protestant church, because the French occupation authorities had billeted soldiers in the local school. Despite malnutrition and the resultant illnesses such as pneumonia, hunger edema etc., the youngster turned out to be a good student - a talented and intelligent but painfully shy boy. Art, history, and essay-writing were his favorite subjects in school.

 

Starving and frequently ill, he was nonetheless soon drawing beetles, bees and flowers for his classmates or helping them with homework assignments and writing essays for children of "wealthy" parents. In this way, he earned his first "extra rations" - a jam sandwich every now and then.

 

Before long, the teachers alerted Mother Zündel to her son's artistic talent, and as a result she found an apprenticeship position for him in Pforzheim, known as the "Golden City" before the war - a city which had been almost entirely destroyed by massive bombing raids just shortly before the war's end and where up to 20,000 people had been cremated alive in a horrendous fire storm.

 

Zündel completed his apprenticeship years in a Graphic Arts Institute in bombed-out Pforzheim, 20 km away. He also attended classes for three years in the Graphic Arts Department of the Trade School. He passed his journeyman's exam with good grades and tried to advance in his profession by applying for a job in Osnabrück, in far-distant northern Germany. One of his reasons for this first "emigration" was to learn proper German - until then he had spoken only Swabian, a dialect which is rather different from High German - and also to rid himself, unobserved by his family and friends, of his troubling shyness. In both he succeeded only to a degree.

 

· 1957 was the time of Allied-imposed German re-armament, a process pushed by Konrad Adenauer. Zündel had been raised as a Christian and pacifist and for this reason soon found himself facing a dilemma regarding the impending term of military service. He decided to emigrate a second time, this time for real to overseas, in order to avoid conscription into the Bundeswehr, the German Armed Forces. At that time Canada was the only country in the Western world which did not require compulsory military service of young men. Canada became his country of choice.

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