Doug Christie – the Canadian barrister who sank UK ‘war crimes’ law

A newly released British government document reveals that Canadian barrister Doug Christie – via his sensational cross-examination of ‘Holocaust expert’ Professor Raul Hilberg in the Toronto trial of Ernst Zündel – effectively undermined the UK Government’s efforts to bring retrospective prosecutions for ‘war crimes’.

In response to intense pressure from Jewish lobby groups, and as one of the last acts of her premiership, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government pushed through what became the War Crimes Act 1991, allowing UK courts to prosecute aged emigrés who had allegedly committed ‘war crimes’ in German-occupied territory during the Second World War.

Enacting this legislation, the Thatcher government overrode opposition in both Houses of Parliament. Conservative MP Tony Marlow suggested that the war crimes law resulted from “a form of moral blackmail as a means of covering the present behaviour of the State of Israel.” His fellow MP Ivor Stanbrook said that the legislation had resulted from a “cruel vendetta” that would be offensive to most British people, and asked: “What about the leaders of modern Israel, some of whom were responsible for the cold-blooded massacre of British subjects and are now received with warmth and hospitality when they come to Britain?”

In a later debate on the same legislation, Stanbrook pointed out that during the Second World War, “the criminals were not restricted to the so-called Nazis but existed on all sides, including the Allied side.”

In the House of Lords, most peers (many of whom had themselves served in the Second World War) objected to such a blatant display of victors’ ‘justice’ and retrospective legislation. Lord Hailsham, the former Lord Chancellor, said that war crimes trials in the UK almost half a century after the alleged crimes would be a “gross perversion of justice” amounting to little more than “lynch law”.

Eventually the Lords voted against the proposed law, which had to be forced onto the statute book by a second vote in the Commons, via the rarely used constitutional provisions of the Parliament Act, allowing the will of the elected chamber to prevail. Tony Marlow renewed his criticism of the law, suggesting that “we have been mugged in this House by some strong lobby… We are puppets on a string … [in] the most sophisticated and heavily orchestrated lobby of the post-war world.”

Author and journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft asked in the Sunday Telegraph: “Could any other lobby have gone so far in persuading a British Government to fly in the face of English justice by introducing retrospective legislation in order to try men for crimes committed more than 45 years ago far from British soil? How did Mr Greville Janner manage it?”

(Janner was for decades the leading British parliamentary spokesman for the Jewish lobby. He died in 2015 while facing criminal charges for sexual abuse of children.)

The War Crimes Act only reached the statute book thanks to what Jewish historian David Cesarani called “one of the longest, most emotional and fiercely contested campaigns in British post-war political history.”

It necessarily involved reliance not only on dubious ‘eye witness’ testimony to events that were already half a century in the past, but also depended on KGB and other Soviet archives. The newly released document records a conversation on 11th January 1994 between Paul Harrison from the newly-established War Crimes Unit of the Crown Prosecution Service, and Bettina Birn, the German-born chief historian in the war crimes section of the Canadian Department of Justice.

Harrison noted:
“Bettina Birn telephoned regarding my request for advice concerning historical expert witnesses. She has given the matter some thought. There are difficulties with regard both to Latvia and Byelorussia [today’s Belarus] in that few people have done much work on the topics.
“The first on any list is Prof. Hilberg from the University of Vermont. He has written the leading work on the subject. He carries a lot of academic weight and looks impressive.
“…There is one caveat. He was used by the Canadians in the trial of Zundel in which he was cross-examined by the notorious Christie. He reacted very badly to this cross-examination and was particularly touchy when it was suggested to him that his opinions were coloured by the fact that he was himself Jewish. Bettina points out that his academic reputation is such that he has absolutely no reason to feel touchy but clearly Christie touched a raw nerve. He has declined to help the Canadian authorities since but may be willing to come to Britain.”

At least half of the document is still redacted, so we are unable to read most of the discussion between Harrison and Birn about the difficulties of obtaining ‘expert’ historical witness testimony regarding ‘war crimes’. But we should note especially their admission that there was a difficulty in finding expert witnesses because “few people have done much work on the topics”. This is the very area of history that in many countries (including now Canada) is protected by laws that seek to jail anyone who disagrees with the officially approved narrative: yet in private prosecutors admit that “few people have done much work on the topics”!

Eventually (despite vast expense) only one man was ever convicted under the War Crimes Act 1991 – Anthony Sawoniuk, a 78-year-old former commandant in the Belarussian Auxiliary Police.

What we do know is that the prosecutors’ problem with Hilberg was due to his humiliation under cross-examination by Doug Christie almost nine years earlier, during the trial of Ernst Zündel in Toronto, Canada.

Zündel was a German-born graphic artist, printer and publisher who had lived in Canada since 1958. During the 1970s and 1980s he had become increasingly active in opposing what he saw as the defamation of his fellow Germans, and in seeking to expose what he saw as untrue allegations about German ‘war crimes’.

Jewish lobby groups became increasingly active against Zündel, and one such lobbyist – Sabina Citron – eventually brought a private prosecution against him, using an obscure and ancient Canadian law against ‘spreading false news’. The state government of Ontario later joined with Citron to make this a public prosecution, and it came to court in Toronto in 1985, with Hilberg as the main ‘expert witness’ for the prosecution. The main charge involved Zündel’s publication and distribution of a short revisionist text Did Six Million Really Die? produced by a British author under the pseudonym Richard Harwood.

Doug Christie’s brilliant cross-examination of Hilberg was a strategy prepared in close cooperation with the great revisionist scholar Professor Robert Faurisson, who was himself an expert witness in Zündel’s defence.

Hilberg was forced to contradict his earlier assertion that Adolf Hitler had issued orders and written plans to carry out a genocide of European Jews. Under oath in the witness box, Hilberg had to admit that in the first 1961 edition of his most famous book on the ‘Holocaust’ he had referred to two specific Hitler orders to carry out a genocide of the Jews, and had claimed the German bureaucracy then worked to specific orders and plans to implement this genocide.

Yet in the revised 1985 edition of this same book – The Destruction of the European Jews – Hilberg had deleted all such references to a Hitler order or written plan. During a lecture in 1982 he had gone so far as to admit:
“[W]hat began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organised centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

Hilberg – the prosecution’s own expert witness, the leading official spokesman for mainstream ‘Holocaust history’ – was asking us to believe that what we are incessantly told was the greatest crime in history was not planned or ordered by anyone, that it resulted from some “incredible” form of telepathy.

There then occurred this memorable exchange.

Christie: “Can you give me one scientific report that shows the existence of gas chambers anywhere in Nazi-occupied territory?”

Hilberg: “I am at a loss.”

Doug Christie died in March 2013 aged 66. His contribution to the struggle for free speech and real history continues to produce what Prof. Faurisson termed “victories of revisionism”.