HOLOCAUST DENIER FACES JAIL IN AUSTRIA
A Vienna court is expected to convict British historian David Irving of charges of Holocaust denial, a crime under Austria law, in a trial opening Monday. Irving will apparently plead guilty to the charges and claim he has "repented," in an attempt to persuade the court to impose a reduced sentence. In interviews with the British media ahead of the trial, Irving and his Austrian lawyer said they did not believe they would win the case. The lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, has claimed recently that Irving had changed his views back in 1992 after he uncovered a radio transmission containing a message to Adolf Eichmann about the extermination of a million Jews at the Treblinka death camp.
Experts cast doubt on the sincerity of these claims. Prof. Dina Porat, head of Tel Aviv University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism, told Haaretz Sunday that Irving's purported repentence is motivated by his fear of a verdict that could amount to 10 years' imprisonment. "It is not possible that Irving changed his mind in 1992 without saying anything about it in the course of the libel trial he initiated in 2000," Porat said. Irving, 67, has published numerous book about World War II. His 1977 book "Hitler's War" is considered a milestone in the development of his Holocaust denial. In the 1980s he forged ties with the Institute for Historical Review, a guiding force among Holocaust deniers.
Irving came to international attention in 2000, when a British court threw out a libel suit that he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for calling him one of the "most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Throughout that trial, Irving habitually addressed the judge as "Mein Fuhrer." The judge ruled that Irving is "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist." Irving was subsequently determined to be bankrupt by the court after he failed to pay the ordered court costs of 150,000 pounds sterling. In recent years, he has run into trouble when he came to deliver lectures in Western countries, and he has been barred from entering Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
He was arrested last November in southern Austria, on a warrant stemming from two lectures he delivered in Austria in November 1989. At the first lecture, delivered before 300 people in the town of Leoben, Irving claimed that Hitler never ordered the extermination of the Jews, that "persons unknown" disguised as Nazi soldiers were behind Kristallnacht, and that Anne Frank's diary was a fabrication. In his second speech, delivered in the back room of a Viennese pub, Irving claimed that "Auschwitz was a legend." The indictment is based on the testimony of an Austrian journalist who taped both lectures and taped a brief interview with Irving in which he repeated the claims.
Irving asked to be released on bail, but the court deemed him a flight risk. His lawyer said that Irving has been receiving between 200 and 300 e-mail messages daily from fans. Several fans who visited him in his cell said that he "is getting star treatment" from the guards. Prof. Porat noted that several other prominent Holocaust deniers have been arrested recently, a development that their supporters claim is evidence of a global Zionist conspiracy to take over the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment