THE controversial right-wing historian David Irving is facing Christmas in jail after he was arrested in Austria accused of denying the Holocaust.

He was arrested on a warrant dating back to 1989 and is being held in a prison in Graz, south of Vienna, for fear that he would abscond before a court hearing.

In 2000, a judge at the High Court in London ruled at a libel trial that he had falsified history and could be described as “a Holocaust denier”. Mr Irving, 67, was stopped in Austria last week on his way to make a speech at a conference of the far-Right group Olympia. Police in Hartberg, Styria, had received a tip-off that he was in the country and acted on the 1989 warrant that was issued after he had denied the existence of concentration camp gas chambers. Denying the Holocaust is illegal in Austria, and carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The Austrian Justice Ministry said that Mr Irving would be kept in custody until the case came to court. The public prosecutor’s office, however, still has to investigate the accusations before deciding whether to press charges.

Until the late 1980s, Mr Irving was a respected historian of the Third Reich and Hitler, though some of his claims were challenged by academics. In 1988 his reputation was damaged when he denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers, but it was not until the libel trial in 2000 that it was widely realised he had manipulated documents to support his pro-Hitler views.

Richard J. Evans, a historian whose assessment of Mr Irving’s works was key to the libel ruling, said that he was surprised that he had dared to enter Austria. Professor Evans proved to the court in 2000 that Mr Irving had manipulated statistics and skewed documents to support his theories.

The Cambridge University historian added: “I don’t think he’s a significant historian. I do think he is undeniably on the extreme fringe of politics.”

At the libel hearing Professor Evans said: “Not one of his books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about.”

Mr Irving was made bankrupt because of the £2 million costs he was ordered to pay when he lost the libel trial against Professor Deborah Lipstadt, whom he had accused of unfairly denigrating his views. In 1992, a judge in Germany fined him more than £3,000 for publicly insisting that the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz were a hoax.

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