With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Holocaust denier jailed for five years in Austria

Notorious Austrian holocaust denier Gerd Honsik was sentenced to five years in prison on Monday, as a Vienna court found him guilty of spreading National Socialist ideology.

While living in Spain from the early 1990s to evade a previous Austrian prison sentence, the neo-Nazi had continued to publish National Socialist ideology in a magazine and other mediums.

"He is one of the ideological leaders of the neo-Nazi scene," prosecutor Stefan Apostol said Friday, alleging that Honsik had also passed out his publications at schools.

Both the prosecution and the defendant plan to appeal the verdict and sentence, Austrian press agency APA reported.

The 67-year-old defendant said he rejected "the doctrine which demonizes National Socialism," but claimed he was not a National Socialist himself.

Honsik, who wrote the book “Acquittal for Hitler?” in 1988, defended himself by arguing that he did not deny the existence of all the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps.

Read entire article at Deutsche Welle