Right-wing British historian David Irving (67) has been sentenced to three years in prison by a court in Vienna for denying the Holocaust 17 years ago.
He was sentenced by a court of eight lay jurors and three judges in a case based on remarks he made in a 1989 interview and in speeches when he visited Austria, where denying the Nazi genocide on Jews is a crime.
Irving (67) pleaded guilty, hoping for a suspended sentence, but the Vienna criminal court concluded he was only making a pretence of acknowledging Nazi Germany's genocide against Jews in order to escape a jail term.
"The court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely changed his mind," presiding judge Peter Liebetreu told the court after pronouncing the sentence. "The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law."
After the trial, Irving said he was shocked by the sentence and lodged an immediate appeal. His lawyer Elmar Kresbach said that even if Irving lost the appeal, he was likely to serve a maximum of two years because of his age and status as a first-time offender.
Irving, handcuffed and wearing a navy blue suit, arrived at the court carrying a copy of one of his most controversial books - Hitler's War, which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.
In court, Irving acknowledged denying in 1989 that Nazi Germany had killed millions of Jews but said he changed in his mind in 1991 after coming across personal files of Adolf Eichmann, the chief organiser of the Holocaust, during a speaking tour in Argentina.
"I said that then, based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now," he said. "The Nazis did murder millions of Jews.
"I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," Irving told the court, speaking in German. But he insisted he never wrote a book about the Holocaust, which he called "just a fragment of my area of interest. In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis." Earlier, he told journalists he considered it "ridiculous" that he was standing trial for remarks made 17 years ago.
He argued the case against him was a denial of his right to free speech and that historians in Austria and Germany, which has similar laws against Holocaust denial, were being told by lawmakers how to write history.
He has been in custody since his arrest in November on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of six million Jews. The state attorney's office said the 1989 remarks were "a dangerous violation of freedom of speech".
Irving was arrested on November 11th in the southern Austrian province of Styria on a warrant issued in 1989. He was charged under a federal law that makes it a crime to publicly diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust.
Irving remains an icon for neo-Nazis and revisionist historians worldwide. His lawyer said last month the controversial Third Reich historian was getting up to 300 pieces of fan mail a week from supporters around the world, and that while in detention he was writing his memoirs under the working title Irving's War.
A British High Court ruling in 2000 rejected Irving's libel suit against an American professor and her publishers, declaring Irving "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist"