- Siegfried Verbeke
Siegfried Verbeke (born June 21st, 1941) is a
Belgian Holocaust denier .History
Verbeke became a public figure in 1977 when, together with the later
Vlaams Blok ideologist and senatorRoeland Raes , he founded the Flemish denial magazine "Haro". This magazine distributed tapes from various speeches made byAdolf Hitler ,Joseph Goebbels andHermann Göring . During this period, he also was a member of theVlaamse Militanten Orde (Flemish Militants Order), an organisation that became notorious for its attacks on immigrants,Walloons , and socialists. The government began dismantling the organisation in 1981 and it had ceased to exist by the 1990s.At the beginning of the 1990s, Verbeke distributed pamphlets in the
Netherlands to people with presumed Jewish names. In 1993, a Belgian court sentenced Verbeke to a one-year suspended prison term for distributing pamphlets belittling the Holocaust. Verbeke was also stripped of his civil rights for 10 years (his active and passive right to vote). The next year Verbeke circulated a booklet challenging, as they called it, "the official version ofthe Holocaust ."Two years later, in 1995, he hit the headlines again by trying to get political asylum in the Netherlands because he was banned from distributing his material in Belgium.
In 1998, criminal proceedings were launched against Verbeke by the public prosecution of
Frankfurt ,Germany , for distributing the anti-Semitic "Goldhagen and Spielberg Lies" to German addresses. In 2000, Verbeke was ordered to abstain from distributing a brochure co-authored with professor of literatureRobert Faurisson that attempted to challenge the authenticity of the "Diary of Anne Frank ". The next year, Belgian Minister for CultureBert Anciaux demanded that all Belgian libraries would remove any works by Verbeke from the shelves.In 2004, Verbeke was convicted in Belgium of
Holocaust denial and given a year in prison and fined €2500. On August 3, 2005, he was again arrested atSchiphol Airport inAmsterdam under an international arrest warrant issued in Germany where he was wanted for Holocaust denial and writing internet articles on the subject. He was sentenced to 9 months in prison, and released on May 5th, 2006.On December 15, 2006, he was again arrested on base of the arrest warrant from the Court of Appeal in Antwerp, issued April 14, 2005. He is currently incarcerated in Belgium.
In June 2008 he has been fined €25000 and sentenced again one year of prison together with the French denialist
Vincent Reynouart for denialism [ [http://www.lesoir.be/actualite/belgique/prison-ferme-pour-deux-2008-06-20-608066.shtml Prison ferme pour deux négationnistes] , Le Soir, 20 June 2008]References
External links
* [http://www.vho.org/ Siegfried Verbeke's official website] (content may be illegal in some jurisdictions)
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