rnie Farber, chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

"I think a lot of us can take a very deep breath and move on to other things - other than thinking of Ernst Zundel anymore," Farber said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press.

Zundel, 67, who was deported from Canada in 2005, was accused of years of anti-Semitic activities, including denying the Holocaust - a crime in Germany - in documents and on the Internet.

Zundel and his supporters have argued that he is a peaceful campaigner who has been denied his right to free speech.

Zundel has been a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier since the 1970s. Among other ventures, he ran Samisdat Publishers, a leading distributor of Nazi propaganda based in Canada. He also provided content to The Zundelsite website, which has followers around the world, hundreds of whom have protested his detention.

Zundel was born in Germany in 1939. He immigrated to Canada in 1958 and lived in Toronto and Montreal until 2001. Canadian officials rejected his attempts to obtain citizenship in 1966 and 1994.

He then moved to Tennessee, where he married fellow extremist Ingrid Rimland, but was deported to Canada in 2003 for alleged immigration violations.

Upon arrival in Toronto, Zundel was arrested and held in detention until a judge ruled in March 2005 that his activities posed a threat to national and international security, and he was deported to Germany.

Zundel has been standing trial in Germany since November of last year in what were, at times, raucous proceedings.

The initial attempt to try him collapsed last March over a dispute with one of his lawyers, Sylvia Stolz.

At one stage she had to be carried from the courtroom, screaming "Resistance! The German people are rising up," after defying an order banning her from the trial on grounds she tried to sabotage the proceedings by denouncing the court as a "tool of foreign domination."

In the current trial, defence lawyer Ludwig Bock quoted from Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and from Nazi race laws in his closing statements last week as argued for Zundel's acquittal.

Bock accused the Mannheim state court of not wanting to face a "scientific analysis" of the Holocaust and alleged that prosecutors - one of whom has termed Zundel a "rat catcher" - had defamed his client.

Another of Zundel's five lawyers, Herbert Schaller, told the court that all of its evidence that the Holocaust took place was based only on witness reports, instead of hard facts.

In his own closing arguments, prosecutor Andreas Grossmann called Zundel a "political con man" from whom the German people must be protected.

Grossmann quoted widely from his Zundel's, which argue that millions of Jews did not die at the hands of the Nazis.

"You might as well argue that the sun rises in the west," Grossmann said when asking that Zundel be given the maximum sentence. "But you cannot change that the Holocaust has been proven."