Tight security was scheduled in Vienna yesterday for the start of the trial of controversial British historian David Irving, who denies the Holocaust took place.
Irving risks a 10-year prison sentence over an Austrian law that prosecutes those who "deny the genocide by the National Socialists or other National Socialist crimes against humanity."
The Austrian press agency APA said that journalists from all over the world as well as sympathizers of Irving were expected at the court session in central Vienna.
Irving, 67, was arrested last November after a routine check on a highway in Austria on a 1989 warrant.
The warrant was issued by a Vienna court against Irving for having allegedly denied at meetings in Austria around 1989 that the Nazi regime used gas chambers in concentration camps.
APA said Irving had also said the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews was not the work of the Nazis but "unknown" people who had dressed up as storm troopers and that Hitler had in fact protected the Jews.
Austrian political science professor Fritz Plasser told AFP the trial would have "strong symbolic meaning" as Austria wants to show the world that it has "fundamentally changed" since the Nazi era, when it was part of Hitler's empire, and is "punishing lies about the Holocaust."
Plasser said Austria is "seen very critically" due to extreme rightists in the country and the fact that the far-right party of rabid nationalist Joerg Haider is the junior party in the Austrian government.
Another analyst, Anton Pelinka, warned that Irving is dangerous as a rallying point for Austrian neo-Nazi sentiment.
But Pelinka said Irving's claims that his right to free speech is being denied would not have much resonance "since Irving is too much a representative of the neo-Nazi scene."
Both analysts downplayed any link between Austria's cracking down on anti-Semitism and calls from the Muslim world for a crackdown against expressions such as cartoons published in Europe that ridicule the Prophet Mohammed but which Western governments say fall under freedom of speech.
"As unwise and ill-advised as the cartoons might have been, and are as far as I am concerned, fighting the Holocaust revisionists has nothing to do with religious and other liberal freedoms but with facing Europe's greatest nightmare," Pelinka said.
Irving, a right-wing historian whose career has been marked by controversy, was apparently on his way to a students' club in Vienna when he was stopped, the APA agency said. Such clubs are often linked to far-right or pan-Germanic movements.
Irving has become notorious worldwide for attempting to establish, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Adolf Hitler was not party to the Holocaust, that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, and that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was wildly exaggerated.
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