Holocaust denier Irving faces court as a 'changed man'

David Irving

VIENNA - Notorious Holocaust denier David Irving was to appear in the dock of a Vienna court today, presenting himself as a changed man who has seen the light about the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jews.

But even the right-wing historian's defence lawyer does not believe it will do him any good.

"He'll most likely be found guilty, and he knows it," said Elmar Kresbach, Irving's counsel.

"It's almost impossible for him to win - the case is a clear breach of the law on Holocaust denial."

Irving, 67, now says he recognises his previously expressed extremist views are untenable.

"He said that's all over now, and I intend to draw a line under them in the trial," Kresbach said.

Irving was arrested on an Austrian motorway in November last year, 16 years after a warrant was issued. He is charged with denying the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp in lectures he gave in Austria in 1989.

Instead of contesting the charges, the strategy is to seek a suspended sentence to avoid 10 years in jail, which is the maximum penalty.

The case, being heard before three magistrates and eight jurors at Vienna's state court, centres on two lectures Irving gave in November 1989.

In the first, he told a 300-strong audience in Leoben that Kristallnacht - the night in November 1938 when 1350 synagogues were destroyed - was carried out by "unknowns" dressed up as members of the SA, that Anne Frank could not have written her diary herself, because the Biro wasn't invented until 1949, and that Hitler never gave an order to exterminate the Jews.

He cited research by the (now discredited) American execution technician, Fred A Leuchter, which concluded that no significant traces of cyanide gas were found at Auschwitz, and accused the Jewish World Congress of spreading the "legend" in 1942 that the Third Reich was preparing its Final Solution.

During the second lecture, a day later, in the back room of a Vienna pub, he went even further. A tape of his speech contains such views as "Auschwitz is a legend, just like the Turin Shroud", and "the existence of witnesses proves that there was no mass extermination".

Dr Christa Zochling, an Austrian journalist who attended both lectures, will be the prosecution's only witness. Irving's reputation was shredded when he lost a libel action in Britain in 2000 against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

* "Two years from now, the German historians will accept that we're right. They will accept that for 50 years they have believed a lie."

* "Ridicule alone isn't enough. You've got to be tasteless about it. You've got to say things like, 'More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz."'

* "I'm unhappy with the way that the Holocaust legend is packaged ... When you give a word a capital H then it begins to look like some kind of brand name that's been very slickly packaged and marketed."

* "Seventy-four thousand died of natural causes in the work camps and the rest were hidden in reception camps after the war and later taken to Palestine, where they live today under new identities."

- INDEPENDENT