Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt was once sued by David Irving, but that doesn’t mean she supports the jail sentence given to the Holocaust denier this week. “I’m in principle against laws that promote censorship. I’m in principle against laws on Holocaust denial. I’m in principle against laws that prevent the publishing of cartoons in Denmark,” Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, told JTA on Tuesday, a day after an Austrian court sentenced Irving to three years in prison for statements he made in 1989 saying there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Lipstadt said, however, that she understands the need for laws on Holocaust denial in countries such as Germany and Austria, given their records during World War II.
The sentence sent a potent message to both local extremists and the international community.
But it also added fuel to freedom-of-speech debates sparked by recent violent protests against Danish cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.
Irving, 67, was arrested in November, when he entered Austria to give a lecture at a far-right student fraternity.
Irving’s lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, lodged an immediate appeal after the sentenced was announced on Monday. He told reporters the sentence had been meant as a political warning.
“Irving had expected certain strictness by the court because he was a very well-known case,” he said. “But the sentence was too harsh. It became a bit of a message trial and the message was too strong.”
Austrian prosecutors on the case want Irving to spend more time in jail. The prosecutors appealed Tuesday, saying that his sentence of three years is too lenient, given Irving’s importance to right-wing extremists.
Irving, who faced up to 10 years in jail, had pleaded guilty to the charges. But he also had said he had changed some of his views and now believed that the gas chambers had existed and that “millions of Jews died.”
“I was wrong, I recognize my guilt,” he told the court, in fluent German. “I have changed my ideas since 1989. History and historic research are like a tree in constant growth.”
Judge Peter Liebetreu was not convinced. “The court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely changed his mind,” he said after pronouncing the sentence. “The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law.”
Lipstadt was not alone among Jewish observers in expressing concern over the latest chapter in Irving’s well-publicized effort to deny the Holocaust.
“The sentence against Irving confirms that he and his views are discredited, but as a general rule I don’t think that this is the way this should be dealt with,” Antony Lerman, former director of the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, told JTA. “It is better to combat denial by education and using good speech to drive out bad speech.”
“Freedom of expression is important,” he said. “Once you start legislating about history, it could lead to a rocky road.”
Other Jewish groups, however, praised the verdict.
“The sentence confirms David Irving as a bigot and an anti-Semite and also serves a direct challenge to the Iranian regime’s embrace of Holocaust denial,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement.
Amos Luzzatto, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, welcomed the verdict for both the message it sent to local extremists and to the international community in the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s declarations that the Holocaust is a myth.
“Even more than the conviction, it was fundamental to remove Irving’s audience,” he said. “An Irving appreciated by supporters of the Iranian president gains strength and listeners; on the other hand, an Irving whom no one pays attention to is finished.”
Irving looked shocked when the verdict was announced. “Of course it’s a question of freedom of speech,” he said. “The law is an ass.”
Austria was part of the Third Reich during World War II, and the country only began to come to terms with its Nazi past in the late 1980s, after it came to light that President Kurt Waldheim had lied about his World War II activities as a soldier in the German army.
The country, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, is one of 11 countries that have laws making Holocaust denial a criminal offense.
The Austrian law subjects to prosecution anyone who “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 the weeks before Irving’s trial took place, violent protests over cartoons depicting Mohammed ignited debates over the limits of free expression and led some to question the validity of legislating what one could say about the Holocaust.
“I don’t think there’s a parallel between this and the cartoon, but in the eyes of the general public that thinks about issues of free speech, it’s an understandable connection,” Lipstadt said.
Britain and the United States have no laws on Holocaust denial.
Both the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League acknowledged the dilemma in their statements.
“While Irving’s rants would not have led to legal action in the United States, it is important that we recognize and respect Austria’s commitment to fighting Holocaust denial, the most odious form of hatred, as part of its historic responsibility to its Nazi past,” Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center said.
This was not the first time Irving had tangled with the law for his views.
In 1992, a German court fined Irving for having publicly declared that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. He was barred from entering Germany and several other countries.
In 2000 he lost a highly publicized libel lawsuit in London against Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin books, after Lipstadt called him a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”
That victory, perhaps, helps support her conviction that books, and not laws, are what should fuel the fight against denying the Holocaust.
“We don’t need laws to fight Holocaust deniers. We’ve got history on our side,” she said.
(JTA Foreign Editor Peter Ephross in New York contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
