Siegfried Verbeke

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Siegfried Verbeke (born June 21st, 1941) is a Belgian Holocaust denier.

[edit] History

Verbeke became a public figure in 1977 when, together with the later Vlaams Blok ideologist and senator Roeland Raes, he founded the Flemish denial magazine Haro. This magazine distributed tapes from various speeches made by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. During this period, he also was a member of the VMO (Flemish Militants Order), an organisation that was notorious for its violent actions against foreigners. The government dismantled this militia in 1981.

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 of the 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 literature Robert Faurisson that attempted to challenge the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank. The next year, Belgian Minister for Culture Bert 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 at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam 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.