Deny the Holocaust, get three years

David Irving's defense tried to paint it as a free speech issue; as Irving so charmingly put it, "Of course it's a question of freedom of speech. The law is an ass."
But the Austrian court saw it differently, accepting his guilty plea of breaking the 1992 law which applies to "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media."
In other words, Irving admits (how could he not?) that he wrongly asserted that the Holocaust never involved a concerted effort to kill Jews, and that Auschwitz had no gas chambers, and that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust.
Irving's track record is court is poor. He sued American Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel in Britain in 2000, and lost. And in 1992 he was fined $6,000 "for publicly insisting the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz were a hoax."
Now he's planning to mirror his book Hitler's War with his own story, Irving's War. Such a pairing speaks all I need to know.