After being deported from Canada to his native Germany on Tuesday, white supremacist Ernst Zundel was arrested as soon as he touched ground in Frankfurt.

"He has been turned over to German authorities,'' Alex Swann, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, told The Canadian Press. "This is a significant step. The process has worked.''

German authorities took him into custody on charges of publicly denyng the Holocaust, which is illegal in that country. The German Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, which attempted to eradicate Jews in Europe over the course of the Second World War. Six million Jews died in death camps over that period.

"I saw my people being destroyed and I was there for so many months,  smelling the putrid smell of burning flesh from those cremetoria chimney," said Holocaust survivor Arnold Friedman, who was incarcerated in the most notorious death camp -- Auschwitz.

Of Zundel, he said: "He's going to prove to the world there was no Holocaust and he's talking to guys who went through it."

Zundel lived for 42 years in Canada as a landed immigrant. His last two years were spent in a jail cell in Toronto, where he was held under a national security certificate.

Last week, a Federal Court judge ruled that Zundel should be deported because he poses a threat to national security. In his 64-page decision, Justice Pierre Blais called the 65-year-old German national a danger to society.

"Mr. Zundel's activities are not only a threat to Canada's national security but also a threat to the international community of nations," Blais said.

Denouncing Zundel as a Hitler sympathizer determined to propagate the neo-Nazi movement, Blais said Zundel was a "leader of international significance" among white supremacists.

Some Jewish groups say Zundel's deportation is the end of a sad chapter in Canadian history.

"I just found it an outrage. A sad and depressing outrage that this man would have the audacity to claim that six million Jews were not murdered," said Bernie Farber, executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress. He felt Zundel's expulsion should have happened sooner.

Zundel, who has no criminal record in Canada, was jailed in 2003. It happened after he was deported here by the United States for overstaying his visa there. He had been trying to gain U.S. citizenship.

Zundel was detained on a national security certificate.

There are advocates who disagree with the use of the certificate, which allows indefinite detention of those deemed a threat to national security without either a charge or trial. Issuing one of the certificates requires the signature of two cabinet ministers and a Federal Court judge.

Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said although he believes Zundel is "a nasty, nasty man," Canada is "behaving unfairly because of the way the security certificate system works."

Zundel's lawyer in Toronto, Peter Lindsay, said his client is "very disillusioned about the process and about being the victim of a secret trial, and now being deported based on evidence he's never seen."

Zundel's legal troubles began in the mid-1980s after the publishing of his pamphlet, Did Six Million Really Die?

He was convicted twice, although the verdicts were thrown out on appeal.

In the mid 1990s he was charged again, this time over his website which spread his Holocaust-denying propaganda. Zundel fled to the U.S. before a trial.

A spokesperson for Germany's federal Justice Ministry said that authorities were able to open a case against Zundel because his Holocaust-denying website is available in Germany, so he is therefore considered to be spreading his hateful message to that country as well.

With files from the Canadian Press and the Associated Press