November 18, 2005
David Irving, the controversial British revisionist historian, is being held in Austria under laws against the denial of the Holocaust. Media quote police which said that Irving had been arrested last Friday in the province of Styria based on a warrant issued in 1989. The right-wing historian was on his way to give a lecture in the capital Vienna. In his books, Irving has argued that the scale of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in World War II has been exaggerated. He also claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had known nothing of the Holocaust. He told a libel hearing in London in 2000 that there had been no gas chambers at the Auschwitz camp. Irving lost the case and the judge branded him "an active Holocaust denier". A spokesman for the Austrian interior ministry told the BBC that Irving was first taken to the town of Graz, but was now in custody in Vienna. Irving was previously arrested in Austria in 1984.
Anti-Nazi groups congratulated the Austrian government. The vice president of the World Jewish Congress, Lord Janner, expressed his hope to the BBC that the move would "lead to a successful prosecution". Janner, who is also head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, said denial of the Shoah was not a matter of opinion. "Austrian law demands incisive action to protect its citizens from a repeat of the past," he added.
