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Photo dated 20 February 2006 shows British historian David Irving in court in Vienna in handcuffs with his 1977 book "Hitler's War" in which he claimed the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler did not know about the mass killings of Jews until 1943 and that he never ordered the Holocaust.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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VIENNA (EJP)--- An Austrian court on Wednesday ruled that the convicted British Holocaust-denier, David Irving, should be released from prison and serve the remainder of his three-year sentence on probation.
The appeals court in Vienna decided to reduce the sentence, imposed in February, to one year of mandatory imprisonment with two years on probation.
The ruling means Irving should be freed as he has already served 13 months in jail, after being arrested in November 2005.
A court in September had upheld Irving’s conviction, levied after a one-day trial on February 20 at which he pleaded guilty to a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry.
But Irving had insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi’s Auschwitz concentratioin camp.
Irving was also on trial for saying the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews was not the work of the Nazis, but of "unknown" people who had dressed up as storm troopers, and that Adolf Hitler had in fact protected the Jews.
He was found guilty on all three denial counts by an eight-person jury.
Austrian law
Irving was prosecuted under an Austrian law targeting those who "deny the genocide by the National Socialists or other National Socialist crimes against humanity."
Austria is among 11 countries that have laws against denying the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis.
In an interview with the Austrian press agency APA last March,Irving insisted there was no evidence of a mass extermination of Jews during WWII, a week after he was jailed in Austria fopr Holocaust denial.
"There is no evidence of an organised mass extermination," he declared.
He denied that "a program against Jews" existed during Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in Germany, saying it was "not purposefully against all Jews."
"If there had been a program, how come 200,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939," he said, suggesting Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler would have rather "exchanged Jews for foreign currency."