The British historian David Irving, who for decades has drawn fierce criticism for claiming that the Nazi genocide of Jews and others did not happen, pleaded guilty in Austrian court on Monday to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in jail.
Mr. Irving is probably best known in the United States and Britain for pursuing a libel lawsuit in the late 1990s against Deborah E. Lipstadt, an Emory University historian who is a leading scholar of the Holocaust. The case resulted in the demolition of his reputation as a researcher (The Chronicle, April 12, 2000).
On Monday, Mr. Irving told the Austrian court that he had changed his views since denying the Holocaust during a 1989 visit to Austria, where making such comments is illegal, the Reuters news agency reported. He said that reading the personal papers of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of carrying out Hitler’s “Final Solution,” had persuaded him that he was wrong.
Some people watching the trial, which was heard by three judges and eight jurors, seemed to doubt whether Mr. Irving’s remorse was genuine. The British newspaper The Times reported that Mr. Irving held a news conference before the trial in which he dismissed the proceedings as a travesty for holding him responsible for 17-year-old comments. The newspaper said he brought that attitude into the courtroom.
“Irving walked in with a swagger,” The Times reported, “but soon ended pushed up against the wall in cross-questioning by the judge that forced him to apologize or express regret for almost every utterance he had made over the past 20 years.”
The prosecutor in the case accused Mr. Irving of making a spurious confession in order to win sympathy with the jury and draw a reduced sentence. He could have faced up to 10 years in prison.
In pronouncing the sentence, the presiding judge assailed Mr. Irving as a “falsifier of history” who had denied the “greatest crime of the 20th century,” The Times reported. On leaving the courtroom, Mr. Irving said, “I’m very shocked, and I’m going to appeal.”
Critics of Mr. Irving noted that years after he said he had experienced his epiphany on reading the Eichmann papers, he was still attending meetings of Holocaust deniers.
For her part, Ms. Lipstadt said she was disappointed at the verdict, apparently reflecting her view that censorship laws and laws against Holocaust denial are poor tools with which to fight claims by people like Mr. Irving. On her blog, she described the trial as “mind boggling,” writing, “I understand the jury’s inclinations -- they were Austrian, after all -- but I am not pleased.”
One thing seems certain: At a time when Western standards of press freedom are being touted in defense of the anti-Muslim cartoons that have been published across Europe and even on some American college campuses, the conviction of Mr. Irving for defying Western norms and attacking the bitterest memory of world Jewry is likely to make him a free-speech martyr to a variety of groups in Europe and across the Muslim world.
Background articles from The Chronicle: