Neo-Nazi coin collection battle in New Brunswick court

The legal battle continues over the $250,000 coin and artifact collection a New Brunswick man willed to an American white supremacist organization before he died in 2004.

A number of groups, including the man’s sister and the New Brunswick government, don’t want the National Alliance to get its hands on the estate of Robert McCorkill and is challenging the will in court.

At a New Brunswick Court of Queen’s bench hearing Wednesday, Justice William Grant looked at some of the claims being made about the National Alliance.

The organization celebrates the achievements of Adolf Hitler and advocates doing "whatever is necessary" to create so-called "racially clean" communities. Grant noted such statements are contained in the group's own publications.

But he rejected other claims against the group that weren't backed by evidence, such as it being linked to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Hearings will continue next month.

The collection in question includes Greek and Roman coins that are thousands of years old, an ancient Iranian sword, and more, according to a 55-page appraiser's report from August 2010.

McCorkill was born in 1937, the son of a farmer in Ontario. He became a chemist and lived in Saskatoon in the 1990s, when he joined the National Alliance.

The University of Saskatchewan's Museum of Antiquities was lent a portion of his coin collection and put it on display for several years.

When McCorkill moved to Ottawa around 2000, he took his collection with him. Some of his artifacts remain on loan to the University of Ottawa's Museum of Classical Antiquities.