Once the certificate was upheld, he was deported to Germany and tried in the state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement of Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s.

His father, Fritz, a lumberjack, was drafted into the German Army shortly after Ernst's birth and served as a medic on the Eastern Front.

[11] He studied graphic art at trade school, graduating in 1957[12] and emigrated to Canada in 1958, when he was 19, to avoid conscription by the German military.

[11][12] The couple moved to Montreal in 1961, where Zündel would eventually come under the tutelage of Canadian fascist politician Adrien Arcand.

[15] Zündel gained prominence during the 1970s as spokesman for Concerned Parents of German Descent, a group that claimed German-Canadians and their children were the target of discrimination due to anti-German stereotyping in the media.

In the late 1970s, Zündel, as the group's spokesman, issued press releases protesting the NBC Holocaust miniseries for its depiction of Germans.

In the late 1970s, reporter Mark Bonokoski unmasked Zündel and ended his career as a credible media spokesperson by revealing that he was publishing neo-Nazi and antisemitic pamphlets such as The Hitler We Loved and Why under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.

[22] The investigation into the parcel bomb attack led to charges being laid against David Barbarash, an animal rights activist based in British Columbia, but they were eventually stayed.

[24][25] By the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers had grown into a worldwide distributor of Nazi and neo-Nazi posters, audiotapes, and memorabilia, as well as pamphlets and books devoted to Holocaust denial and what he claimed were Allied and Israeli war crimes.

On 23 April 1981, the West German government sent a letter to the Canadian Jewish Congress, confirming that the source of the material was Samisdat Publishers.

Zündel then began shipping from a post office box in Niagara Falls, New York, until the ban on his mailing in Canada was lifted in January 1983.

One of the prosecution witnesses, Auschwitz survivor Arnold Friedman, a Holocaust educator in Toronto, testified that "prisoners marched off to the ovens never returned" to which Zündel's lawyer, Doug Christie, replied "if those who disappeared might not have been led out a nearby gate".

[31] In 2003, Zündel was arrested by the United States government for violating immigration rules, specifically visa waiver overstay, which he argued was a trumped up charge.

This claim elicited public ridicule; Rex Murphy, a columnist for The Globe and Mail and a well-known commentator on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, wrote, "If Ernst Zündel is a refugee, Daffy Duck is Albert Einstein ...

During the hearing, Zündel characterized his position as "Sometimes I feel like a black man being convicted on Ku Klux Klan news clippings.

His lawyer, Doug Christie, introduced as a "surprise witness" Lorraine Day, a California doctor who practiced alternative cancer treatments, to testify that Zündel's incarceration at Toronto's Toronto West Detention Centre was causing his chest tumor (revealed to the court a few weeks previously) to grow and his blood pressure to rise, that the medication supplied to control his blood pressure was causing side effects such as a slow heart rate and loss of memory, and that he needed "exercise, fresh air, and freedom from stress.

"[33] On January 21, 2004, after three months of hearings including both public and secret testimony, Justice Blais again ruled against Zündel with a damning statement.

[34] During his imprisonment, Canadian right-wing leader Paul Fromm attempted to hold numerous rallies in support of Zündel, both in Ontario and in Alberta.

[36] Upon his arrival at Frankfurt airport, he was immediately arrested and detained in Mannheim prison awaiting trial for inciting racial hatred.

Zündel's public defender Sylvia Stolz was also dismissed on the grounds that her written submissions to the court included Mahler's ideas.

Stolz signed "Heil Hitler" on court motions, said the Holocaust was "the biggest lie in world history," and yelled that the judge deserved the death penalty for "offering succour to the enemy".

The judge in his emotional closing speech called Zündel a "Brunnenvergifter und Brandstifter, einen Verehrer dieses menschenverachtenden Barbaren Adolf Hitler, von dem er dummdreist daherschwafelt" ("well-poisoner and arsonist, an admirer of this human-despising barbarian Adolf Hitler, of whom he rambles on with brash impertinence").

Holocaust deniers used Zündel trials to claim that freedom of speech was impaired in Germany as that it depended on the ideology of the speaker.

[46] Following the end of his prison term, Canadian Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews reiterated that Zündel would not be permitted to return to Canada.

[47] On March 31, 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Administrative Appeals Office ruled Zündel inadmissible to the United States, rejecting his application for an immigrant visa which he had sought in order to be reunited with his wife.

He was classified as inadmissible, because he has been convicted of foreign crimes for which the sentence was five years or more and a waiver deemed unwarranted due to Zündel's "history of inciting racial, ethnic, and religious hatred".

His main offerings were his own books claiming that flying saucers were secret weapons developed by the Third Reich and now based in Antarctica.

Along with Willibald Mattern, a German émigré living in Santiago, Chile, Zündel also wrote UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?

According to Frank Miele, a member of The Skeptics Society in the United States, Zündel told him that his book UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?

[57] In 1997, Zündel granted an interview to Tsadok Yecheskeli of the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, that includes the following exchange: Zundel: If you are fishing for any political information, my father was a Social Democrat, my mother a simple Christian woman.