angelophile | A well deserved FUCK YOU for David Irving

VIENNA, Austria - Right-wing British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison Monday after admitting to an Austrian court that he denied the Holocaust — a crime in the country where Hitler was born. He had pleaded guilty to the charge.

"I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," he told the court in the Austrian capital.

Irving appeared stunned by the sentence, and told reporters: "I'm very shocked and I'm going to appeal."

Irving's lawyer said he considered the verdict "a little too stringent".

Irving, 67, arrived in the court room handcuffed, wearing a blue suit, and carrying a copy of Hitler's War, one of many books he has written on the Nazis, and which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.

Irving was arrested in Austria in November, on a warrant dating back to 1989, when he gave a speech and interview denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. He was stopped by police on a motorway in southern Austria, where he was visiting to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity.

In the past, he had claimed that Adolf Hitler knew little, if anything, about the Holocaust, and that the gas chambers were a hoax.

The judge in his 2000 libel trial declared him "an active Holocaust denier... anti-Semitic and racist".

"Of course it's a question of freedom of speech," Irving said. "The law is an ass."

"He is everything but a historian ... He is a dangerous falsifier of history," prosecutor Klackl said, calling Irving's statements an "abuse of freedom of speech."