[Previous entry: "U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review"] [Next entry: "If Hamas must renounce violence, so should Israel"]

02/21/2006:

"Irving jailed for denying Holocaust"

avid Irving, the discredited historian and Nazi apologist, was last night starting a three-year prison sentence in Vienna for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Irving, who appeared in court confidently yesterday morning carrying his book Hitler's War and a PG Wodehouse paperback, immediately vowed to appeal against the sentence. "I'm very shocked," he said as he was led from Vienna's biggest courtroom back to the cells where he has been held for the past three months.

...Austria has Europe's toughest law criminalising denial of the Holocaust. Irving went on trial for two speeches he delivered in the country almost 17 years ago. He was arrested in November last year after returning to Austria to deliver more speeches despite an arrest warrant against him and being barred from the country.

In the two 1989 speeches he termed the Auschwitz gas chambers a "fairytale" and insisted Adolf Hitler had protected the Jews of Europe. He referred to surviving death camp witnesses as "psychiatric cases", and asserted that there were no extermination camps in the Third Reich.

State prosecutor Michael Klackl said: "He's not a historian, he's a falsifier of history." Arguments over freedom of speech were entirely misplaced, he added: "This is about abuse of freedom of speech."
guardian.co.uk