David Irving's upcoming trial in Vienna on charges of being a Nazi apologist has rekindled debate on the boundaries of free speech, writes Derek Scally
David Irving planned to write his autobiography when he was an old man. Thanks to the Austrian authorities, however, the discredited 67-year-old historian has already written a few hundred pages behind bars in a Vienna prison.
There's a certain irony that Irving, probably Hitler's greatest apologist, is continuing the prison memoir tradition of the Nazi dictator, and in the country of his birth.
No doubt one of the liveliest chapters will tell of his arrest last November on an Austrian motorway on his way to give a lecture to a right-wing student fraternity in Vienna. The grounds for Irving's arrest were speeches he made in Austria 16 years earlier in which he said the gas chambers in Auschwitz never existed.
That statement breaches Austria's Verbotgesetz, a 1946 law that punishes Holocaust deniers or Nazi glorifiers with 10 years in prison.
Irving has indicated he will plead guilty to the charge on Monday, meaning a short hearing that may end in a conviction but a prison term of time he has already served.
Opinion is divided over the trial at a time when the issues at stake have much in common with the freedom of speech debate still raging over the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
One side of the argument sees Irving as a dangerous figure who uses the disguise and methods of a historian to advance Holocaust denial and Hitler revisionism and who needs to be silenced by the full rigours of Austrian law. The other side sees Irving either as a dangerous man or a deluded fool whose right to free speech should be defended, but whose speeches should be ignored.
Irving's methods and motives as a second World War historian have always been suspect, but grew more egregiously so when he began ridiculing Auschwitz survivors at neo-Nazi rallies and when he wrote in Hitler's War that the dictator knew nothing of the Holocaust and even tried to protect European Jews from annihilation.
For American academic Deborah Lipstadt, this put Irving firmly in the camp of Holocaust deniers, but when she said so in a book, Irving sued her and her publisher.
IT WAS A fatal mistake on Irving's part - the trial destroyed what was left of his reputation by exposing the tools of his trade: mistranslation and deliberate oversights with source materials and transforming his own assumptions into facts that fitted his ideological bias.
When caught, repeatedly, at this game during the libel trial, Irving, with his brilliant brain for facts and dates, reverted to the stereotypical bumbling Oxbridge don who has accidentally muddled things a little or who simply used "author's licence" to "help the reader along".
"All your little fictions, your little tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction - exculpation of Adolf Hitler," remarked Deborah Lipstadt's lawyer during the trial.
The absent-minded professor act has worked well for Irving in indulgent British academic circles. Abroad, he built up his reputation as a public speaker with a talent for telling a crowd - academic or neo-Nazi - what they wanted to hear.
His method mixes often-irreverent delivery with cheeky half-truths, and when the audience has been softened up he administers his poison, be it by talking up the total death toll in the bombing of Dresden or by talking down the death toll in Nazi death camps.
Despite her expensive and exhausting court battle, Lipstadt has been a leading voice calling for Irving to be released from prison and let fade into obscurity. But US and British calls to defend freedom of speech have clashed with what Germans and Austrians see as a solemn obligation to stop Holocaust denial being considered a free-speech entitlement.
THE PRE-TRIAL debate in Austria has also raised questions about how the country has dealt with the legacy of its Nazi past. In 2004, some 165 people were charged and 20 prosecuted under the laws Irving is accused of breaking. Yet the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna has complained that about 40 elderly Nazi suspects still live unpunished in Austria.
Ever a contradiction, David Irving is likely to make a meek guilty plea on Monday, but his views on Auschwitz and the Holocaust have changed since 1989. In prison interviews, he's much more bullish.
"I won't let myself be intimated by any government," he said in a newspaper interview. "It's clear that I was lured into a trap. I've been treated in modern Europe with modern Gestapo methods." Irving's trump card may be that, unlike in his unsuccessful libel case, he is now the defendant, David versus the Goliath that is the Austrian establishment. The court case is unlikely to answer many of the free speech questions it raises, but a quick hearing will ensure that it is David Irving, and not Austria, on trial.