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Convicted British historian Holocaust-denier David Irving chats with a journalist as he arrives at Heathrow airport after serving 13 months of a prison sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial. Irving was released on probation by the Austrian supreme court.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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LONDON (AFP)--- Convicted British Holocaust-denier David Irving on Thursday arrived in Britain after Austria expelled him and banned him from ever returning.
The expulsion ended 13 months behind bars for 68-year-old Irving, convicted for attempting to establish Hitler was not party to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry and that the number of those slain was exaggerated.
He arrived on an Austrian Airlines flight at London’s Heathrow airport just before 9:00 pm, after boarding a flight in Vienna, according to police officer Andreas Bieber.
In parting comments in Vienna to AFP, Irving made clear his disgust with Austria, one of 11 countries that have passed laws forbidding the denial of the Holocaust, and said he had been misunderstood.
"Austria is a piss-poor little country. They say that they want to prevent me from coming back.
"I have no interest in coming back," Irving said by telephone from prison before boarding his flight.
He was put on a plane home after an Austrian appeals court Wednesday ruled he be released from prison and serve on probation the remainder of his three-year sentence.
The court said the decision was due to amount of time that had elapsed since the comments were made in 1989, and that he had stuck to a statement at his trial last February that he now accepted the Holocaust had taken place.
Austrian ban
The Austrian government decreed a residency ban on Irving Thursday "in the light of Wednesday’s verdict," immigration policeman Willfried Kovarnik said.
"He can not set a foot, even a toe, ever in Austria again," Kovarnik said.
Irving expressed his anger in his telephone interview with AFP.
"If you go to Saudi Arabia and you drink beer, you get arrested. This is the same kind of thing. It tells a little bit about the quality of the country," Irving said from prison.
He said it had been "a great shock to find myself arrested or kidnapped for what I said" 17 years earlier and that this was an affront to free speech.
Irving said it was dangerous for him to discuss before he left Austria his views but that he would say: "I think Mel Gibson was right."
He was apparently referring to drunken rantings by the American actor in July, which caused worldwide uproar, that Jews were responsible for causing all the wars of the world.
False signal
The Jewish community of Vienna said in a statement that Irving’s release, coming after a conference in Iran challenging the reality of the Holocaust, sent "a false signal."
Irving said he had "never denied the Holocaust" but that he felt historians had not researched the issue properly.
Irving said he had been held in solitary confinement for 400 days during his imprisonment here.
During this time, "I’ve written 4,000 pages on two different books, 2,000 on a Heinrich Himmler biography, and 2,000 pages of personal memoirs," Irving said. The biography of Himmler will investigate the role of the Nazi SS chief and Adolf Hitler in the Holocaust, he said.
He said he would hold a press conference on Friday in London to "call for an international boycott on German and Austrian historians until their governments drop these absurd laws" against challenging the Holocaust.
These historians should "not be allowed to attend international conferences, to teach at foreign universities because they have behaved shamefully over the past 20 years.
"They write conformist history, safe history so that they don’t go to prison," Irving said.
