Irving jailed for Holocaust denial

RIGHT-WING British historian David Irving was convicted in Austria yesterday of denying the Holocaust — a crime in a country once run by the Nazis — and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Irving, who had pleaded guilty, had insisted during his one-day trial that he had a change of heart and now acknowledged the Nazis’ World War II slaughter of six million Jews. He had faced up to 10 years behind bars for the offence.

Austrian prosecutors filed charges against him under the 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism, and criminalising the “public denial, belittling, or justification of National Socialist crimes.”