MANNHEIM (AFP-EJP)--- A German court on Thursday sentenced 42-year-old Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf to two and a half years in prison for inciting racial hatred.

The court in Mannheim in southern Germany found that Rudolf had contested the murder of six million Jews in Europe during World War II in propaganda on the Internet and in various publications.

Rudolf described the Holocaust as "a gigantic fraud" at the start of his trial.

He said that he had found no evidence that the gas chambers used to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews ever existed.

A trained chemist who once worked at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Rudolf has published pseudo-scientific claims that it was impossible that Zyklon-B poison was used in the gas chambers at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.

Rudolf fled Germany in 1995 after a court handed him a suspended sentence of 14 months for whipping up anti-Semitic sentiment and went to live in the United States.

In November 2005, he was extradited to stand trial in Germany where he was charged with incitement to racial hatred.

His conviction follows that of neo-Nazi "historian" Ernst Zuendel, one of the leading figures in the Holocaust denial movement, also in Mannheim last February.

Zuendel was jailed for five years, the maximum sentence for Holocaust denial in Germany,for his books and websites which contained fulsome praise of Adolf Hitler and abuse towards Jews.