Ernst Zundel's third marriage seemed to be going beautifully until five armed agents showed up last month as he framed pictures on his garage workbench.
After a long, conflict-ridden career that included countless court appearances, a firebombing, a run for the prime minister's office, and vilification as Canada's best-known Holocaust denier, Mr. Zundel had settled down with a woman who seemed tailor-made for him.
Ingrid Rimland, the third Mrs. Zundel, decorated their chalet-style home in the green, rolling hills of Tennessee with white curtains, lace doilies and, of course, a cuckoo clock. For Mr. Zundel, it was as though he had been transported back to his childhood in Germany's Black Forest.
"He was so happy here," Ms. Rimland said. "And then they came and stole Ernst away. What kind of country do you have here? Hitler must be laughing in his grave."
Mr. Zundel is in an Ontario jail waiting to see if he is eligible for refugee status in Canada. If not, he faces deportation to his native Germany, where he is wanted on hate-crime charges. None of this fazes Ms. Rimland.
Mr. Zundel and his first wife separated after 18 years dominated by his cause. His next marriage, to a woman 17 years his junior, ended after the second Mrs. Zundel came to see him as "evil incarnate," and supplied evidence against him to the RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
If God had designed a wife for Ernst Zundel, He would have been hard-pressed to do better than Ms. Rimland, a survivor of Second World War Europe who emerged from her experience with an abiding faith in the Nazi cause.
Ms. Rimland first glimpsed Mr. Zundel when he was keynote speaker at a 1994 Holocaust-denial conference in Los Angeles.
She recalls being deeply impressed with his "manly power." Ms. Rimland, a freelance writer, also thought she could help Mr. Zundel, who was entangled in legal actions over his publishing business, which produced books and tapes dedicated to proving that the Holocaust never happened.
"I believed I could make people understand what Ernst was trying to say," she said.
Romance did not blossom immediately. Their relationship began on a business footing. Mr. Zundel gave Ms. Rimland $850 to study on-line publishing. Ms. Rimland, who lived in California, established The Zundelsite, which became a clearinghouse for right-wing thought, and began documenting Mr. Zundel's life as one man's heroic struggle against oppression -- a narrative arc that paralleled that of Hitler himself.
Mr. Zundel arrived in Canada in the summer of 1958. The next year, he married Janick Larouche, a French Canadian whom he met in a language class in Toronto. Ms. Larouche and Mr. Zundel bought a comfortable home in Montreal.
Mr. Zundel worked as a commercial artist, photographer and photo retoucher. The couple had two sons, Pierre and Hans. Mr. Zundel wrote a column for a student newspaper and contributed to university television broadcasts.
While travelling, Mr. Zundel met Adrien Arcand, a right-wing author and activist known as "Canada's Hitler." Mr. Zundel became an acolyte. He created a company called Samisdat Publications, which grew from a few texts about Holocaust denial to a vast offering of Nazi memorabilia that included posters of "Nazi secret weapons" and audiotapes such as Adolf Hitler Speaks.
In 1967, after Lester Pearson resigned as prime minister, Mr. Zundel made an energetic, but poorly received bid to lead the federal Liberal Party. In 1968, he embarked on a year-long tour of Africa, the Middle East, Israel, India and Asia to expand his understanding of political conflicts.
The marriage began to fray under the pressure of his relentless schedule. In 1977, Mr. Zundel and Ms. Larouche separated.
In 1996, Mr. Zundel married Irene Margarelli, a divorcée from a small town in Pennsylvania. The marriage was over in less than a year and a half. Although Ms. Margarelli would not agree to an interview, the saga of her union with Mr. Zundel is documented in evidence files, court transcripts and the memories of acquaintances.
Ms. Margarelli's marriage to Mr. Zundel moved quickly from infatuation to hatred. "At one point I really loved him," she told an acquaintance. "By the end, I thought he was evil incarnate."
She first heard of Mr. Zundel in 1995 in a profile in a right-wing magazine. She saw him as a champion of free speech. She called him. Ms. Margarelli soon began receiving a flood of material from Mr. Zundel by mail.
In February of 1996, Ms. Margarelli flew to Toronto to meet Mr. Zundel. A month later, they were married. Their home was the infamous bunker, a three-storey Victorian in downtown Toronto that was Mr. Zundel's base of operations.
It was a tumultuous time. The building had been firebombed the year before, causing an estimated $400,000 in damage, and wiping out much of Mr. Zundel's extensive library. He had been feverishly fortifying the building with armaments that included bulletproof windows, barbed wire, video-surveillance systems and a "nuclear-proof" basement bomb shelter.
In the early days of the marriage, Mr. Zundel was, by all accounts, solicitous and loving. Ms. Margarelli woke up one morning to find Mr. Zundel had drawn a picture of himself on a Post-It note, adding a Fuhrer mustache. Beneath the picture was an inscription: "Good morning, Frau Zundel. You are loved."
The new Mrs. Zundel watched the scene outside the bunker in amazement. There were countless anti-Nazi rallies, and police cruisers went by day and night. The scene inside was scarcely less chaotic. Visitors and staff poured through. A printing press in the basement ran constantly, as did the huge, high-speed photocopier. Mr. Zundel met with people around the clock. Ms. Margarelli called it "an anthill."
Mr. Zundel was constantly planning new ventures: the construction of a scale model of Auschwitz, a new study that would prove that Hitler was still alive, the writing of yet another speech. Mr. Zundel always had something to do, whether it was debunking a new attack on the Third Reich, making a new audiotape, or analyzing the latest video of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, an obsession for Mr. Zundel.
Ms. Margarelli admired her husband's drive. "Most people won't even get off the couch, unless it's to open a beer," she told an acquaintance. "But that's not a problem with Ernst. The man has some serious energy."
However, the new Mrs. Zundel found herself worn down by her husband's pace -- and she began to see a darker side. In interviews with the RCMP and CSIS, she said Mr. Zundel read her mail and listened to her phone calls. When she played music by a popular Brazilian singer, he demanded that she turn it off, calling the singer a man of "mixed blood."
She described Mr. Zundel's adulation of Hitler, who he referred to as "The Great One." She told investigators that the Fuhrer's birthday was "a sacred day" in their household, and that Mr. Zundel believed Hitler was alive; instead of committing suicide in the Fuhrerbunker, he was spirited away in a spaceship designed by "brilliant German scientists."
Mr. Zundel would brook no disrespect for his idol. Ms. Margarelli told CSIS that she quickly learned never to mention Charlie Chaplin; Mr. Zundel flew into a rage over the comedian's "Little Tramp" character, which he considered a sacrilegious impersonation of Hitler.
She also gave evidence about a frightening incident in February of 1997, while a Jewish journalist was interviewing Mr. Zundel at the bunker. Ms. Margarelli said her husband "attacked" the man, and told him "the Jews would die." As she recalled, Mr. Zundel told the man that "blood would run as high as a horse's bridle; a Holocaust is coming. I just hope I live to see it."
The next month, she moved out. She was interviewed by investigative agencies. Seven months later, dressed in black, she was back in Toronto to testify against Mr. Zundel before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which had charged him with using his Web site to distribute hate literature.
Mr. Zundel was unable to respond from his Ontario jail cell to an interview request. But on his Web site, his marriage to Ms. Margarelli is explained as a mistake during a time of crisis. It says Mr. Zundel's mother had died in Germany the month before, and that he had been unable to attend the funeral because there was a warrant for his arrest in Germany on charges of distributing hate literature.
"In all this turmoil, and in a haze of pain and fatigue, he made a disastrous personal decision," the Web site says. "On March 14, he abruptly married an American woman he had only known for a short period. Disaster was in the making."
By the time he married Ms. Rimland in 2001, Mr. Zundel was in need of domestic bliss. He and Ms. Rimland, both in their 60s, bought a home in small-town Tennessee.
Mr. Zundel took long walks and puttered in his garden to get a break from the cause.
"We came here to regroup," Ms. Rimland says. "We didn't want to spend all of our time fighting with the Jews."
On Feb. 19, Mr. Zundel was caught up in his cause once again, when U.S. immigration agents arrested him at home and deported him to Canada, where he awaits his fate at the hands of the Immigration and Refugee Board.
This week, Ms. Rimland said the world had never seen the "decent and articulate" Ernst Zundel she knew.
"He's a real man, and there aren't many of those around," she said. "He's not the bumbling goof that the press always makes him out to be. He's a man with a spine, a man who can dig in his heels. What woman wouldn't be attracted to that?"