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Austrian court jails British historian for Holocaust denial

Updated: 21/Feb/2006 17:04

British historian David Irving (R) arrives with his lawyer Elmar Kresbach in court in Vienna with handcuffs 20 February 2006. In his 1977 book "Hitler's War," 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.

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Right-wing British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court Monday for denying the Holocaust 17 years ago, despite his claim to have changed his views.

Irving, 67, had pleaded guilty at the trial in Vienna on a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry but insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving, a controversial figure who has had brushes with the law in several countries, appeared stunned by the three-year sentence and told reporters as he walked out of court: "I'm very shocked and I'm going to appeal."

But chief judge Peter Liebetreu said in his final decision that Irving's "confession" of changing his mind "did not seem to us remorseful and that is why it did not especially influence the calculation of the sentence."

Austria is among 11 countries that have laws against denying the Holocaust.

Fluent German

Irving told the court in fluent German during the seven-hour hearing that he no longer believed that reports of gas chambers were a propaganda ploy as he had learned new information, including what he said were documents of Nazi Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann that he had found in 1991.

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His statement that "there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz (was) false," he told court.

Irving, who had faced up to 10 years in prison, has been in custody since his arrest last November following a routine check on a highway in Austria. This time will be counted towards his three-year term.

The warrant had been issued by a Vienna court in 1989 on charges that, at meetings in Austria, he had denied the Nazi regime used gas chambers.

Irving was also on trial for saying in Austria that 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 counts by an eight-person jury.

His defence lawyer Elmar Kresbach said they would appeal the sentence.

He said the case had been "a little bit of a message trial" in an Austria trying to show it has come to grips with its Nazi past, but that "three years is too much of a message."

Kresbach said he expected Irving to serve no more than two years because "he is old and a first-time offender."

Role play

Prosecutor Michael Klackl said he wanted some time to consider the verdict to see "whether the public has been served."

In his closing plea, Klackl had listed statements from Irving since 1989 which the prosecutor alleged "were anti-Semitic or glorified the person of Adolf Hitler."

Klackl said Irving's turnaround on the gas chambers was "just a role played for one day. He has not changed his opinion."

Irving was prosecuted under an Austrian law targeting those who "deny the genocide by the National Socialists or other National Socialist crimes against humanity."

He told reporters on entering the court in Vienna in handcuffs that it was "ridiculous" to be on trial for comments made 17 years ago.

"I am not a Holocaust denier," he added. "My views have changed. History is a constantly growing tree. ... The more documents are available, the more you learn, and I have learned a lot since 1989."

The Holocaust was Nazi Germany's systematic slaughter of some six million Jews, mainly in the later years of World War II.

Irving has become notorious worldwide for attempting to establish, despite overwhelming evidence otherwise, that Hitler was not party to the Holocaust, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that the number of Jews slain by the Nazis was greatly exaggerated.

Irving insisted on the logic of some of his statements, such as saying the fact 100,000 people survived Auschwitz was a sign the gas chambers did not exist, even if he now regretted the formulation.

Monday's verdict of prison time was a second major blow for Irving. In 2000 in London he lost his fortune when he lost a high-profile libel case against US historian Deborah Lipstadt after she called him a Holocaust denier.