THE sincerity of David Irving’s claim that he now believes millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis and that gas chambers did exist was challenged by his twin brother yesterday.

John Irving is so unidentical to the right-wing historian and Holocaust denier that he serves as chairman of Wiltshire Racial Equality Council.

Asked about his brother’s recantation before a Vienna court, John Irving told The Times: “If I said ‘E pur si muove!’ would it mean anything to you?” The quotation is often attributed to Galileo who was forced by the Inquisition in 1633 to retract his heretical belief that the Earth moves around the Sun.

The astronomer and philosopher was facing the death penalty but escaped with life imprisonment after disowning his findings. Under his breath, he is reputed to have murmured the now famous Italian phrase meaning: “Yet still it moves.”

David Irving denounced his previous denial of the Holocaust at the opening of his trial where he faced a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment under Austria’s anti-Nazi laws. His apparent contrition helped reduce that to three years.

Irving was ruined when he sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in London in 2000 after the American academic branded him “one of the world’s most prominent and dangerous Holocaust deniers”.

Mr Justice Gray described the historian as “an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic and racist” who had “distorted historical data to suit his own ideological agenda”.

Dr Lipstadt yesterday told The Times that Irving’s retraction was “rubbish”.

Speaking by telephone from Italy, she said: “I wouldn’t be the least surprised if, when he arrives back in London, he will say, ‘The reason I said this was a get-out-of-jail-free card’.”

She fears the prosecution has raised his profile. “I understand why Germany and Austria have this kind of law because of their history,” she said. “I am against these kind of laws. I don’t believe in censorship. I don’t think it’s efficacious.”

Unable to pay Penguin Books’ costs, Irving was forced into bankruptcy and lost his home in Mayfair, London.

He now lives with his girlfriend Bente Hogh in a more modest, rented flat in Kensington, West London.

His books are sold via a website belonging to a publishing company run by Ms Hogh. Although he claims to have rejected his old views, he makes the full texts of his works available on the internet for free downloading. Nuremberg: The Last Battle is filled with references to claims that Nazi gas-chamber atrocities were exaggerated by the Allies. Various versions of his book Hitler’s War are freely published there too.

His website hails “the courageous Viennese students” whose invitation to Austria resulted in his arrest. It claims that, while in prison, he has handwritten a 600-page autobiography Irving’s War. Irving makes regular visits to the United States, hosting the annual Real History, USA, Festival in Cincinnati.

Highlights have included a showing of Leni Reifenstahl’s notorious propaganda film Triumph of the Will about Hitler’s 1934 Nazi congress in Nuremberg.

His American opponents relish trying to disrupt his progress, telephoning hotels and restaurants in advance to cancel his bookings. One Jewish website recalls a US tour where Irving was forced to stay in cheap motels.

The Community Security Trust, a London-based Jewish organisation, was also sceptical. “Today Irving appears to have said that there were gas chambers but this has always been blindingly obvious,” a spokesman said. “It should only create news if he continues to say this upon leaving prison and seeks to challenge the opinions of those who use the perverted practice of Holocaust denial in order to goad and hate Jews.”

HISTORY LESSONS

‘I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz’ ‘In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis’ ‘The more documents are available, the more you learn, and I have learned a lot since 1989’
David Irving yesterday

‘I’m unhappy with the way that the Holocaust legend is packaged . . . When you give a word a capital H then it begins to look like some kind of brand name that’s been very slickly packaged and marketed’
Lecture given in New Zealand in 1993

‘74,000 (Jews) died of natural causes in the work camps and the rest were hidden in reception camps after the war and later taken to Palestine, where they live today under new identities’
During a 1989 lecture tour

‘I don’t think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was’
During cross-examination, 1988

TOWARDS ANATHEMA

March 24, 1938 born in Essex to John, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, and Beryl, an illustrator

1963 first international bestseller, The Destruction of Dresden, vastly exaggerates number of Germans killed by RAF bombing

1977 bestseller Hitler’s War claims that the Führer knew little of genocide of the Jews

1987 claims that Anne Frank’s diary is a forgery and publicly denies the existence of the gas chambers

2000 sues the US academic Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a dangerous Holocaust denier; loses the action and ordered to pay £3 million costs

2005 arrested in Austria under 1989 warrant