Austria has arrested David Irving for Holocaust Denial.

international | crime and justice | news report

Friday November 18, 2005 11:41

by -

the Austrian interior ministry has confirmed that police in the province of Styria acted on a warrant issued in 1989 to arrest David Irving last Friday.

Irving a revisionist historian, and NAZI apologist has consistently denied the Holocaust and has in the past been invited on several occasions to speak to leading Irish Univeristy debating societies.

Irving was in Austria en route to another lecture in vienna in which he would most probably have denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler. Because that's his job.

The author of many books, Irving claims the scale of the extermination of the Jews and others by the Nazis has been exaggerated.

He also claims Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.

He told a libel hearing in London in 2000 that there had been no gas chambers at the Auschwitz camp.
The historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin had brought the case. In her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," Ms. Lipstadt characterized Mr. Irving as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" and said "he is at his most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to conform to his conclusions."

He lost the case and the judge Charles Gray of the British High Court, called him "an active Holocaust denier" and said he was a racist anti-Semite who had deliberately distorted the historical record to portray Hitler in a flattering light. It was at that stage that he most definitely lost his previous reputation for observing the lowest standards of the historian profession -

It was not the first time that he had made such claims in a court, In 1992 a German judge fined him $6,000 after he publicly asserted that no gas chambers had been used in Auschwitz.

The news was broken to the public not by the Austrian authorities but by a notice left on Irving's own website, which probably means TCD Phil, TCD hist, UCDL&H debating societies & the gun-toting freedom of speech monitoring Willie O Dea knew before us.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Austria, which has a confused history with Nazism and the Holocaust. A country which styled itself the "first victim of Nazi aggression," even though more than a million Austrians fought for the Axis, including Kurt Waldheim, who later became secretary general of the United Nations and president of Austria.

In addition, many prominent Nazis repackaged themselves as Austrian politicians in the postwar era, like Friedrich Peter, a onetime Waffen SS commander who headed the Freedom Party.

The Austrians have not decided whether it was appropriate to charge him so many years after the fact. If he is tried and found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison, officials told Reuters.

Supporters of Mr. Irving said in the Web site statement that he had been invited by "courageous students to address an ancient university association" in Vienna. The statement said that "the Austrian political police are believed to have learned of the visit by wiretaps or intercepting e-mails."

In the past he has been refused entry to Germany, Australia, Canada, Austria and Italy.

Austrian officials are expected to decide in the next day or two whether to charge Mr. Irving.

coverage:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4446646.stm