06 September 2006
Austria's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by British historian and convicted Holocaust denier David Irving. A Vienna court sentenced Irving to three years in jail in February for speeches he gave in 1989 in which he denied the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. Irving contended that most of those who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution. He was arrested in November 2005 when coming to Austria to give a lecture. Since that time, he has been held in police custody. Austria has some of Europe’s strictest punishments for Holocaust denial. Irving pleaded guilty and said he had erred in claiming that Auschwitz had not had gas chambers. The Austrian Supreme Court now denied an appeal by Irving during a closed session last week, according to the Austrian news agency APA.
