Politics & Power Quote by Ernst Zundel

The sentence is a legalistic throat-clear disguised as candor: Zundel opens by conceding the bare minimum - that Nazi Germany committed “crimes” - while carefully keeping his real target offstage. It’s a preemptive hedge, designed to inoculate the speaker against the most obvious rebuttal (“you deny Nazi wrongdoing”) and, more pointedly, against the social and legal penalties attached to Holocaust denial. By saying “I am not saying...” he performs moderation without actually committing to any substantive account of what happened.

The key maneuver is in the vagueness. “Crimes” is both true and conveniently nonspecific: it can encompass aggression, repression, and atrocities in the abstract while avoiding the particular, documented annihilation of Europe’s Jews. The phrase “under the leadership of the National Socialist government” shifts emphasis from an ideological project to a generic “government,” a rhetorical downgrade that encourages listeners to file Nazi violence under ordinary wartime excess rather than a program of extermination. It’s also a subtle distancing move: the crimes become something Germany did “under” a leadership, not something embedded in a broader social and institutional machinery.

Context matters: Zundel is a far-right activist long associated with Holocaust denial and propaganda. In that ecosystem, this kind of concession functions as a gateway. It reassures casual audiences and skeptical interviewers, then creates space to pivot to the denialist move that typically follows: yes, “crimes” happened, but not that crime; yes, something bad occurred, but the central claim is exaggerated, fabricated, or misattributed. The sentence is less an admission than a setup.