An Austrian appeals court has ruled that the convicted British Holocaust-denier, David Irving, should be released from prison and serve the remainder of his three-year sentence on probation. But authorities continue to hold him, pending what could be deportation proceedings.
Irving, 68, has already served 13 months in jail, after being arrested in November 2005. He was sentenced to three years in February this year after being found guilty on three counts of Holocaust denial in remarks he had made in Austria 17 years before.
“He is free,” the office for his lawyer Herbert Schaller said shortly after the judgement but Austrian authorities are debating whether to ban Irving from staying in Austria and are holding him in an immigration prison.
Police spokeswoman Regina Schwaighofer said there would be a hearing on whether to expel Irving or set him free without a residency ban.
Ms Schaller said she was almost certain that Irving would be allowed to leave Austria for London, with a police escort taking him directly from prison to the airport.
She said there was no need for a residency ban as Irving “never wants to set foot in Austria again”.
Irving’s lawyers had argued that his sentence should be reduced, while the prosecution had asked the appeals court to extend the prison term.
In presenting the ruling, chief judge Ernst Maurer cited the “exceptionally long time since the crime” as well as Irving’s argument that he no longer denies the Holocaust took place, the Austrian news agency (APA) reported.
Irving was clearly relieved in court saying “Thank you, your honour” in German to the judge and then saying in English to a woman acquaintance in the court, “Now I get a kiss”, APA reported.
The British Press Association news agency quoted him as saying, “I’m returning to England. I’m fit and well but feeling sorry for my family”.
He also said he was calling for an “academic boycott until the German and Austrian governments stop putting historians in prison”.
His partner, Bente Hogh, 43, said: “He’s rung to say he’s coming back. It was half expected, because he has served over a year. I’m pleased – I don’t think it was fair, to be honest”.
A court in Septemper had upheld Irving’s conviction, levied after a one-day trial on February 20 at which he pleaded guilty to a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry.
But Irving had insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp.
Irving was also on trial for saying the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews was not the work of the Nazis, but of “unknown” people who had dressed up as stormtroopers, and that Adolf Hitler had in fact protected the Jews.
He was found guilty on all three denial counts by an eight-person jury.
Austria is among 11 countries that have laws against denying the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were slaughtered by Nazi Germany, mainly in the later years of World War II.
Irving became notorious worldwide for attempting to establish, against the evidence, that Hitler was not party to the Holocaust and that the number of Jews slain by the Nazis was greatly exaggerated.
In 2000, Irving lost a high-profile libel case against US historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom he had sued when she called him a Holocaust denier.
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So Austria harbors 2 birds of the same feather – David Irving YMS and Moshe Aryeh Friedman sheyirfash (along with their own homegrown neo-Nazis)?
The Austrians’ guilt over being the descendants of collaborators who welcomed the Anschluss leads them to embrace neo-Nazis, Shoah deniers, and Freaky Freedy.