'No remorse' as Irving returns to UK

Controversial historian David Irving arrived back in the UK defiantly saying he would repeat the comments which led to his imprisonment in Austria.

Mr Irving said he felt “no need any longer to show remorse” for his views on the Holocaust, for which he was sentenced to three years behind bars.

He also called for a boycott of all Austrian and German historians until the laws which made Holocaust denial illegal in those countries were overturned.

Mr Irving spoke after being deported from Austria, having served a third of his sentence on charges of denying the Holocaust.

His release came after Vienna’s highest court ruled two thirds of the writer’s jail term should be converted into probation.

Speaking at Heathrow Airport last night, Mr Irving said: “On Auschwitz I was mistaken. I said that there were no gas chambers, although that was strictly true because I later discovered evidence that they were in fact just outside the camp.

“But I now accept that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. On the overall question, however, I think that historians have been looking at the wrong camps.”

He said that the Reinhardt camps were the “real killing centres” but that the Nazis had extinguished all traces of them.

“This has screwed up the tourist trade, so they concentrated on Auschwitz instead.”

He says that during his court case he was “obliged to show remorse”, but he had now “decided I have no need any longer to show remorse”.

He said that his experience serving 400 days in “solitary confinement” alongside “rapists, bank robbers and car thieves” meant that he met the sort of people “you wouldn’t normally meet” and saw the sort of things “you wouldn’t normally see”.

He said he spent the time “recalibrating” and writing his memoirs.

During his imprisonment, he said that he and his seriously ill wife, Bente Hogh, had lost their central London home.

He hit out at what he described as a “secret society of judges” in this country who are still determined to destroy him.

“They haven’t succeeded,” he said. “My enemies are deeply shocked that I’m out. They thought I would die in prison.”

He said of his ban on returning to Austria that although he had no desire to go back to the country, he would appeal against it.

He also spoke of his concern that he could be extradited at any moment to face charges in other countries.

“Following the expansion of the European Union, extradition has become so much easier that it has become more dangerous for me.”

He described his arrest in Vienna after he arrived in the city, under the cloak of secrecy, to give a talk.

He said that the moment he arrived at the venue where he was due to speak, he saw plain-clothes officers surrounding it and tried to make his escape. But they followed him, he said, and he was finally surrounded by armed officers as he drove down the motorway away from the venue.

He said he had prepared a page for his website announcing his arrest every time he left the UK for the past 10 years, and his wife was briefed to release the news on receipt of a code word, which he used when he was arrested and charged in Vienna.

He said: “These laws render Austrian and German historians’ work worthless, because any consensus that is reached is a consensus only in name, because they have swept away the opposition already. They must scrap these ridiculous laws.”

He said he would return to temporary accommodation in central London and begin to rebuild his life from there.

Irving had been in custody since his November 2005 arrest on charges arising from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 for which he was accused of denying the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews.

He has argued that most of those who died at concentration camps, including Auschwitz, succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.