German Holocaust Denier Imprisoned for Inciting Racial Hatred

A German court sentenced Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf to two and a half years in prison for inciting racial hatred in publications and Web sites which "systematically" called into question the Nazi genocide.

The court in Mannheim in southern Germany on Thursday found that Rudolf, 42, had contested the murder of six million Jews in Europe during World War II in propaganda on the Internet and in various publications.

Rudolf, a trained chemist who once worked at the renowned Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, described the Holocaust as "a gigantic fraud" during his trial. He published pseudo-scientific claims that it was impossible that Zyklon-B poison was used in the gas chambers at the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp.

He also said that he had found no evidence that the gas chambers used to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews ever existed.