Another Holocaust Denier Convicted In Austria

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Former Austrian MP John Gudenus was sentenced in Vienna, on 26 April, to a year’s imprisonment suspended for three years for denying Nazi crimes.

Gudenus, 65, an editor of the far right-wing Vienna weekly Zur Zeit, and who is sometimes called “Count”, a title abolished in Austria in 1918, gave an interview to Austrian state TV last year in which he said he needed proof for the existence of Nazi gas chambers and demanded that their existence should be checked “physically and scientifically”. At the time, he quit the Freedom Party (FPÖ) so as not to cause it problems.

Shortly after his TV outburst, Gudenus visited the former concentration camp at Mauthausen, where he made tasteless remarks about a picture exhibited there by saying that the young prisoners photographed after the camp’s liberation “look really quite good” while he himself “looks worse”. A few weeks later, Gudenus also gave an interview to the liberal paper Der Standard and claimed “there were no gas chambers in the Third Reich”. They were, he declared, only in Poland adding, “That’s what it says in the schoolbooks.” This remark prompted the public prosecutor to open proceedings against the former Austrian army colonel who was, at the time, a member of the Bundesrat (the Federal upper house).

Gudenus, pleading not guilty to charges of denying or playing down the Holocaust at his trial in Vienna, claimed he took his information from the textbook for 14-year- old-pupils and tried to differentiate between the “Third Reich” which, according to him lasted only until the annexation of Austria in March 1938, and the Great German Reich. The court did not accept this hair-splitting. Gudenus’ lawyer Farid Rifaat argued that his client’s statements were an expression of his “personal insecurity” and spoke also about “historical insecurity” but the court dismissed this. Public prosecutor Karl Schober stated that the existence of gas chambers have been proved by scientists and that “historical insecurity”, in this case, is punishable in Austria.

The jury duly found Gudenus guilty of denying Nazi crimes and the court handed him a suspended jail term. His lawyer and a day later the public prosecutor has appealed against this sentence. If a higher court is increases the sentence, Gudenus might lose his civil servant’s pension as any civil servant (including former soldiers and officers) sentenced to more than a year in prison loses this status.

Meanwhile, in another case, in Klagenfurt, the public prosecutor’s office has said – scandalously – that it will not be charging Dr. Siegfried Lorber, a former top civil servant in the province of Carinthia, for stating publicly that the gas chamber at the former Mauthausen camp was “built for the tourists” after the end of the War.

Another Holocaust Denier Convicted In Austria

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