The disgraced historian David Irving claimed today that his trial in Austria was staged and confirmed that he would appeal against his three year prison sentence.

Speaking from his cell in Vienna’s Josefstadt jail, he struck a more defiant note than he had earlier this week when pleading guilty to denying the Holocaust in two speeches in the country in 1989.

In court, Irving, 67, insisted that he had changed his views and now acknowledged the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. He also admitted that he had been wrong to suggest that there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But he told Sky News that this was "not a change of heart so much as...refining your position" as he had learnt more.

Despite pleading guilty to Holocaust denial, which is a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison in Austria, Irving said: "I don’t like this phrase 'denying the Holocaust'.

"Any sane historian is going to be entitled to open this package that the media describe as the Holocaust and look at the individual contents and say ’well, this part I believe and this part I believe and most of that I believe but there’s one thing here that I don’t believe’.

"And that’s what I did...When you come to Auschwitz, with the big tourist display they have now in Poland, I don’t believe half of what they show you.

"Now that’s not denying the Holocaust it’s saying, listen, I’m not a mug, I want to be told the truth and nothing but the truth."

Irving, a self-taught historian who has written nearly 30 books on Nazi Germany and Second World War, was arrested on a return visit to Austria last November.

He said today that his car was pulled over and he was held at gunpoint by eight policemen.

After a day long trial on Monday he was sentenced to three years in prison. The Vienna criminal court concluded that he was pretending to acknowledge Nazi Germany’s genocide against the Jews in order to escape a jail term. Austria’s state prosecutor filed an appeal yesterday to lengthen the sentence.

"I think they are trying to silence me now," Irving said today.