Holocaust Denial Charges Against Irving

Austrian prosecutors filed charges yesterday against David Irving, the Nazi apologist historian branded a racist and anti-semite by a high court judge five years ago, for allegedly denying the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Mr Irving has been remanded in Austria for the last 12 days after being arrested by motorway police in southern Austria on a tip-off while en route to deliver a speech on the second world war to a rightwing student fraternity in Vienna.

He has two weeks to appeal against the charges, which stem from two speeches he made in Austria 16 years ago. A remand hearing is expected by the end of the week in Vienna to decide whether he should remain in detention pending a decision to take the case to trial. Friday's hearing could decide to remand him for a further four weeks. If the case comes to trial, it is not likely to take place until next year.

The prosecution service made plain yesterday it would argue strongly for continued detention because of the risk that Mr Irving could flee Austria if released.

Austria's "Auschwitz lie" legislation is said to be the harshest anywhere, and criticised by some as an assault on free speech. The prosecutors filed charges under the 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism, specifically a paragraph criminalising the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes".

"A charge was filed in relation to two speeches in 1989 in which he denied the existence of gas chambers," said Otto Schneider of the Vienna prosecutor's office. He added that the alleged offences would carry a sentence of up to 10 years' jail.

The charges filed by the prosecutor's office note that in the allegedly incriminating speeches made in Vienna and in the southern town of Leoben in 1989, Mr Irving also declared that Hitler had protected Jews and that the notorious pogroms and ransacking of Jewish property before the war in November 1938 - Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass - had been carried out by unknown persons dressed as Nazi stormtroopers. The charge sheet alleges that Mr Irving stated that Hitler "held his protective hands over the Jews".

Mr Irving, 67, the author of more than 20 books on the second world war and a forceful advocate of the view that Hitler knew little about the Holocaust, was ruined financially and disgraced professionally five years ago when he lost a libel case in the high court against Deborah Lipstadt, a US historian whose book on Nazi apologists single out Mr Irving as a persistent offender in Holocaust denial.

Mr Irving was saddled with £2m costs and a withering 334-page verdict from Justice Gray. He has been barred twice and deported once from Austria.