Controversial British historian David Irving, who denies the Holocaust took place, is under arrest in Austria on a 1989 warrant issued over his negationist views, the country’s interior ministry said Thursday.

Irving was detained after a routine check on a highway last Friday.

The November 1989 warrant was issued by a Vienna court against Irving for being an apologist for the Nazi regime, Interior ministry spokesman Rudolf Gollia said, and to stop him taking part in a neo-Nazi meeting.

The offence carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The right-wing historian was apparently on his way to a students’ club in Vienna when he was stopped, Austria’s APA agency said. Such clubs are often linked to far-right or pan-Germanic movements.

International notoriety

Irving, 67, has become notorious worldwide for attempting to establish, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Adolf Hitler was not party to the Holocaust, that there were no gas ovens in Auschwitz, and that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was wildly exaggerated.

He has been condemned by the courts several times, notably in Britain and Germany, where denying the Holocaust is a crime, and last year he was refused entry to New Zealand.

Irving’s most famous case came in the UK in 2002 when he sued American author Deborah Lipstadt who had described him as a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book Denying the Holocaust.

Irving lost the case and was forced into bankruptcy after the judge ruled that he was "an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic and racist".

UK reaction

British communal leaders immediately expressed their support for the Austrian government’s actions.

Lord Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “I congratulate the Austrians for doing what our law should but does not permit. I hope this will lead to a successful prosecution.”

The committee running Britain’s Holocaust memorial day, held as in many countries across Europe on 27 January, also welcomed the arrest.

Stephen Smith, Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said:v“Austrian law demands incisive action to protect its citizens from a repeat of the past. Holocaust denial is a manifestation of the kind of anti-Semitism that led to the deportation and death of European Jewry.

Stressing the impact of Irving’s views, Smith added: “Denial is not a matter of opinion, it is a politically loaded and vary dangerous assertion that leads directly to the rehabilitation of National Socialism and all the evil that it stood for.

“The facts are that between 1933 and 1945 six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, as well as Roma, Sinti, black people, mentally and physically disabled people and lesbian and gay people. Many of the Slavic peoples were also targeted for persecution and murder.”