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| British Holocaust denier Irving on trial in Austria
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British revisionist historian David Irving (C) ducking his head to avoid eggs thrown at him by anti-Nazi demonstrators as he enters the High Court in London 11 April 2000 to hear the verdict in his libel case.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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Controversial British historian David Irving, who denies the Holocaust took place, goes on trial in Vienna on Monday, risking a 10-year prison sentence for his negationist views.
Irving, 67, was arrested last November after a routine check on a highway in Austria on a 1989 warrant.
The warrant was issued by a Vienna court against Irving for having allegedly denied at meetings in Austria around 1989 that the Nazi regime used gas chambers in concentration camps.
Denying the Holocaust is illegal in Austria, as it is in Germany.
Symbolic trial
Austrian political science professor Fritz Plasser told Agence France Presse the trial would have "strong symbolic meaning" as Austria wants to show the world that it has "fundamentally changed" since the Nazi era, when it was part of Hitler’s empire, and is "punishing lies about the Holocaust."
Plasser said Austria is "seen very critically" due to extreme rightists in
the country and the fact that the far-right party of rabid nationalist Joerg Haider is the junior party in the government.
Another analyst, Anton Pelinka, warned that Irving is dangerous as a
rallying point for Austrian neo-Nazi sentiment.
But Pelinka said Irving’s claims that his right to free speech is being
denied would not have much resonance "since Irving is too much a
representative of the neo-Nazi scene."
Both analysts downplayed any link between Austria’s cracking down on anti-Semitism and calls from the Muslim world for a crackdown against expressions such as cartoons published in Europe that ridicule the Prophet Mohammed but which Western governments say fall under freedom of speech.
"As unwise and ill-advised as the cartoons might have been, and are as far as I am concerned, fighting the Holocaust revisionists has nothing to do with religious and other liberal freedoms but with facing Europe’s greatest nightmare," Pelinka said.
Far right students
Irving, a right-wing historian whose career has been marked by controversy, 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.
The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s systematic slaughter of some six million Jews, mainly in the later years of WWII.
Irving 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 chambers 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, and last year he was refused entry to New Zealand.
He is reportedly also banned from residing in Australia, Canada, Italy and South Africa as well as Germany.
Irving made his name with a book about the Allied air raids on Dresden and biographies of General Erwin Rommel and the Nazi deputy leader Rudolph Hess.
In his first book, "The Destruction of Dresden," he called the air raid on the southern German city "the worst single massacre in European history."
He sparked widespread controversy with his book "Hitler’s War" in 1977, in which he claimed the Nazi dictator did not know about the mass killings of Jews until 1943 and that he never ordered the Holocaust.
In 2000, Irving lost a high-profile libel case in London against US
historian Deborah Lipstadt, who had called him a "Holocaust denier" in her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
In that case, the defense said Irving had mistranslated documents and falsified statistics in his work.
The judge called Irving "a racist, an anti-Semite and an active Holocaust denier," but last month Lipstadt told the BBC he should be released and allowed to go home so that he did not become a martyr.
"Generally, I don’t think Holocaust denial should be a crime," she was
quoted as saying on the BBC’s website. "I am a free speech person, I am against censorship."
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