Jürgen Graf

Jürgen Graf (born August 15, 1951 in Basel) is a Swiss author, former teacher and Holocaust denier. Since August 2000 he has been living in exile, and is currently living in Russia with his wife where he also works as a translator.

Background

Graf studied philology at the University of Basel; English, Romance and Scandinavian studies, and in 1979 completed his licentiate. Graf first spent several years working as a school teacher teaching languages and later taught German at a Taipei school in Taiwan. On his return to Basel, he worked as interrogator of asylum seekers for the delegates for refugees at the receiving agency on the repurposed Rhine cruise ship Basilea. His experiences he described in his 1990 book "The Ship of Fools" (Das Narrenschiff), which became a "sweeping blow against abuse of asylum laws" and earned him the accusation of xenophobia. Economically, the book was a success.

In the early 1990s Graf was already a convert to Holocaust negationism, and was introduced to historical revisionism by his friend and retired school teacher Arthur Vogt to read the works of Serge Thion, Arthur Butz and Wilhelm Stäglich. During the 1990s Graf published several controversial writings on the subject of the Holocaust, his first titled "The Holocaust on trial: Eyewitness accounts versus natural laws" (Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand: Augenzeugenberichte versus Naturgesetze), several of his later books co-authored with the Italian Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno. Graf sent his book to many journalists and parliamentarians and was thus known as a vowed negationist. Consequently, he was summarily dismissed from the teaching profession. Graf was later employed in a non-governmental school in Basel, where he taught German language to foreign students. Graf's publications eventually led Swiss authorities to prosecute him for violating Swiss anti-racism laws.