British bishop to pay 6,500 euro fine for Holocaust denial

July 13, 2011 - 13:00 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - A German appellate court reduced on Monday the fine imposed on Richard Williamson, a bishop of a fundamentalist Catholic group, for denying the Holocaust, Haaretz reported.

It fined him 6,500 euros (9,230 dollars) for incitement to hatred, which under German law includes any claim that the Holocaust did not happen. Williamson told a TV interviewer in 2008 that Jews were killed, but he did not believe the Nazi gas chambers ever existed.

A lower court had previously fined Williamson 10,000 euros and both the defense and the prosecution appealed.

Williamson, a 71-year-old Englishman, is one of four bishops appointed by the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), a group that is semi-independent of the Church. The Vatican triggered a furor when it revoked his excommunication in 2009, just one year after his Holocaust denial statements.

Williamson's case was tried in absentia by the State Court in Regensburg, southern Germany with a lawyer representing him.

In the interview, conducted by a Swedish reporter at an SSPX seminary near the city, Williamson claimed the Nazis killed far fewer Jews than the established toll of 5 to 6 million, and there had been no gas chambers to kill them.

At the Regensburg hearing, prosecutors had sought in vain to have Williamson's earlier fine increased.

Williamson's lawyer contended that the bishop had not broken German law because his remarks were not intended for broadcast in Germany.

The Williamson case embarrassed the Catholic Church both when the statements were made as well as when his excommunication was rescinded.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries. It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.