Judge, Ernest Mauer, who freed Holocaust denier Irving has close ties to far-rightist Haider
Irving is set to leave Austria after winning an appeal today against a three-year prison sentence for denying the Holocaust,The Austrian judge who ruled in favor of his release is considered to be a supporter of Jorg Heider's rightist Austrian Freedom Party, the Austrian news agency APA reported on Wednesday.
When Haider's party was a coalition member, judge Ernest Mauer was appointed as member of the Austrian Broadcasting authority Osterriechischer Rudfunk.
Denying the Holocaust in Austria, which provided a significant number of top Nazi leaders including Adolf Hitler, is a crime punishable by up to 10years in prison. In 2000, Irving sued the US Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel at the high court in London, losing the case. Charles Gray, the presiding judge in that case, wrote that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist".
In Germany in 1992, he was fined several thousand pounds for saying the Auschwitz gas chambers were a hoax.
At his trial in February, however, Irving said he had revised his opinion after seeing the personal files of Adolf Eichmann. Speaking in German, he told the court he now accepted that the Nazis had killed millions of Jews.