Mr Irving had fallen foul of an Austrian law (which also applies in 10 other countries) stating that you can't deny the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps during the Second World War. He was arrested last November by chance, when police stopped him on a motorway in Austria. He was later charged in relation to two speeches delivered in Austria 16 years ago.
The now infamous historian, seemed shocked by the severity of the sentence. A judge in Vienna told Mr Irving that he'd become a role model for neo-Nazi organisations the world over by regularly denying Hitler's involvement in the extermination of Jews and claiming that "only" 30,000 Jews had died during the war.
Sensational book
In his sensational book Hitler's War Irving alleged that the German dictator knew nothing of the persecutions and wrote that "Kristallnacht" (when thousands of Jews were rounded up and arrested and their businesses destroyed) was not organised by the Nazis but by "unknown" people who dressed in the uniforms of stormtroopers.
Mr Irving's conviction has got a mixed reaction, especially as Europe is currently debating the merits or otherwise of printing 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The British newspaper The Times wrote in a commentary, "The ideas of Irving are repulsive and wrong, but the right to have such ideas must be allowed."
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David Irving originally denied that gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, then changed his mind. |
There's also been reaction from the Institute of Historical Review, a US-based organisation which supported Mr Irving in his court case. Spokesman Mark Weber told Radio Netherlands: "The sentence is an outrage. Punishing David Irving or anyone for peacefully expressing an opinion about history is a giant step backwards to the legal standards of the Middle Ages. The sentence also points up a blatant double standard that prevails in Austria, France and some other European countries that punish those who challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the Holocaust."
"These countries that defend in the name of free speech the right of cartoonists and writers to mock and insult the religious sensibilities of Muslims and Christians at the same time deny that right to those that challenge the prevailing Holocaust orthodoxy."
Freedom of speech?
Ronnie Naftaniel, spokesman for the Dutch Jewish organisation CIDI argues that this isn't a case of debating freedom of speech, but that it's much more a matter of protecting relatives of the dead:
"What Mr Irving is doing has nothing to do with religion, has nothing to do with political ideas, it had to do with the denial of an historical fact and it insults people who survived the Second World War and who lost families. The question of freedom of speech should not be taken into account in these kinds of cases."
The matter might not be over yet, with David Irving's lawyer planning an appeal and it's unlikely to be the last word from the historian himself: yesterday he announced that he'd already started writing a biography in prison of Britain's wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill and is planning an autobiography.
Tags: Auschwitz, Churchill, David Irving, Hitler, Holocaust, Jew, Nazi, Second World War, SS, stormtroopers, Vienna