DAVID IRVING, the British historian facing up to ten years in jail for denying the fact of the Holocaust, will today be ushered into a side entrance of a Vienna courthouse to avoid an angry confrontation between neo-Nazis and leftwingers.

“He will be delivered at the same time as the laundry,” a policeman said at the fortified courthouse close to the Vienna Town Hall. The 67-year-old historian, who has been held in detention since November 11, when he was arrested at a motorway café, has become an embarrassment to Austria and has stoked up a row on whether Holocaust denial should be punished under criminal law. If the court jails Mr Irving he is likely to become a martyr for far-right groups across Europe.

Police are well prepared for the arrival of his supporters. “We have to reckon with people shouting out Nazi slogans and making the Hitler salute,” Werner Autericky, a security expert for the Austrian counter-terrorism service, said. Spectators are to be banned from the upper gallery of the courtroom for fear that neo-Nazis or leftwingers might try to bombard the three judges and eight-man jury with leaflets or something more dangerous.

Outside the Vienna courthouse, a Holocaust survivor will be at the centre of a demonstration to confront Mr Irving’s neo-Nazi admirers.

Austria’s “Banning Law” forbidding public questioning of the Holocaust or the glorification of the Nazi regime has been part of the country’s legal fabric since 1946. It is often applied — charges were brought against 724 people in 2004 — but rarely leads to a jail term. Mr Irving — an idol of the far Right for more than three decades — is seen, however, as a particularly acute case.

Eva Menasse, one of Austria’s leading commentators, said: “He is the missing link between beer-soaked violent skinheads and the anti-Semitic world conspiracy theorists.”

On a lecture tour of Austria in 1989 Mr Irving declared Auschwitz to be as much a legend as the Turin Shroud. The authenticity of the Holocaust, he said, could not be established by documents, but only by the testimonies of survivors who were “psychiatric cases”.

The fate of the six million Jews, he said, was clear. “Seventy-four thousand 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.” The comments were tape-recorded. On the fringes of the two meetings in Vienna and Leoben, he gave an interview with a journalist, declaring: “I stand by what I said, there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.”

The journalist, Christa Zoechling, 45, will be the prime, perhaps the sole, prosecution witness. Elmar Kresbach, Mr Irving’s defence lawyer, says that his client will plead guilty. Mr. Irving’s plan is to win a suspended jail sentence and leave the country. Then he will be free to travel to Iran, where he has been invited to attend a “scientific” congress on the Holocaust organised by the Tehran regime. The only way for Mr Irving to secure a light sentence would be to convince the jury that he had changed his spots. A statement released through his lawyer says that he no longer holds the views that he espoused in the back rooms of pubs in 1989. In 1992, he says, he found documents which suggested that there might indeed have been mass executions in at least three concentration camps — Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec.

But Michael Klackl, the prosecutor, is not convinced that Mr Irving has seen the error of his ways. In a London libel trial six years ago, Mr Irving changed his testimony almost daily. At times he has argued that the Auschwitz gas chambers — if they existed at all — were designed to destroy lice-ridden clothes. The crematoriums, he has argued, were used to burn those who had died of typhoid fever.

The open question is whether Mr Irving will use the Vienna trial to launch another public attempt to revise the history of the Holocaust. Herr Klackl, however, is prepared — with the help of advisers — to make a speech affirming the reality of the Holocaust.

DEATH-CAMP CHALLENGERS

Bobby Fischer, the former world chess champion and fugitive from justice, is known for his anti-Semitic views. In 1962 he told Harper’s Magazine that there were “too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don’t seem to dress so nicely.” He has publicly denied the Holocaust’s existence and expressed admiration for Hitler. After renouncing his US citizenship last year, he said that he was considering an application to reside in Germany