Quebec judge should recognize Nazism led to Holocaust, legal expert, Jewish group say

Legal experts and Jewish group B'nai Brith Canada say Quebec judge should recognize Nazism led to Holocaust following the latest developments in a trial involving a Montreal man.

Prominent Jewish group B’nai Brith Canada and a legal expert are questioning a Quebec judge’s claim that it is not a widely accepted fact that Nazi ideology led to the murder of Jews.

The link between Nazism and the Holocaust is so well-known that prosecutors don’t need to establish that fact in a courtroom, they say, in response to an unusual drama that played out in a Montreal courtroom last week.

“Any reasonable person would take as an undisputable fact that Nazi ideology led to the Holocaust,” Lisa Dufraimont, a professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, said in an interview Tuesday. “Entertaining arguments to the contrary is a kind of hairsplitting that goes beyond what is reasonable, it seems to me.”

Dufraimont’s comments were in reaction to the latest developments in a trial involving a Montreal man accused of willfully promoting hatred against Jews. Gabriel Sohier Chaput, 35, was charged in connection with an article he has admitted to writing that was published in 2017 on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.

The blog post included racist images and comments about Jews throughout, and the website displayed photos of Hitler and other images associated with Nazism. The accused testified during the trial that the Daily Stormer was a “parody site.”

During the prosecution’s final arguments on Friday, Quebec court Judge Manlio Del Negro admonished the Crown for not submitting evidence, such as expert testimony, that Nazi ideology led to the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews during the Second World War.

Prosecutor Patrick Lafreniere said he expected that the link between Nazism and the Holocaust would be accepted by the judge as judicial notice, a rule that evidence presented in court is not in dispute.

That link, however, was indeed disputed by Sohier Chaput’s defence lawyer, Helene Poussard, who told the court that while the Nazis did kill millions of Jews, the Nazis’ murderous antisemitism was not ideological.