Austria Refuses Bail to Briton Accused of Denying Holocaust

VIENNA, Nov. 25 - An Austrian judge on Friday denied a request for bail for the British historian David Irving, who is accused of violating the country's laws against denying the Holocaust.

The ruling meant that Mr. Irving, 67, whose highly eccentric and widely rejected views of Nazi history have gained him worldwide notoriety, will remain in prison for at least four more weeks while Austrian prosecutors prepare an indictment against him.

Mr. Irving was arrested in northern Austria on Nov. 11, during a trip to speak before a right-wing student group. The charges against him, however, date from 1989, when he made two speeches in Austria in which he was reported to have contended that the Nazi gas chambers did not exist.

Austria, which was annexed to Germany before World War II, was a part of the Third Reich until it was liberated by Soviet and American troops a few months before the Nazis' defeat in 1945. It is one of a handful of countries that have laws forbidding the expression of the opinion that the Holocaust, the Nazis' mass slaughter of Jews during the war, did not take place. Other countries with such laws are Germany itself, France, Belgium and Poland.

Mr. Irving's lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, has said in interviews in recent days that Mr. Irving has retracted some of his views, including his opinion about the gas chambers. He argued in court on Friday that if Mr. Irving were granted bail and allowed to return to Britain, he could easily be found again and returned to Austria for trial. But prosecutors said that it would, in fact, be very difficult to extradite Mr. Irving once he had left Austria.

"He changed some of the views he is so famous for," Mr. Kresbach said in an interview with The Associated Press. "He told me, 'Look, there was a certain period when I drew conclusions from individual sources which are maybe provocative or could be misinterpreted or could be even wrong.' "

Mr. Kresbach said that Mr. Irving had in recent times examined archives in the Soviet Union that led him to conclude that the gas chambers existed after all, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Irving's arrest has provoked debate here, with some Austrians arguing that however objectionable his views, he ought to be allowed to express them. Christian Fleck, an Austrian sociologist, wrote a long article in Der Standard, a Viennese daily, on Wednesday saying that Mr. Irving had committed "an opinion offense against which it is not appropriate to evoke the danger of the resurrection" of the Nazi Party.

Responding to Mr. Fleck, Hans Raucher, a columnist for the same newspaper, wrote: "The denial of the Holocaust in a systematic public form is no 'opinion offense.' It is the attempt to dilute the essence of Nazi rule in front of a consenting or at least undecided audience and thus to turn National Socialism into something positive."

Efforts to reach Mr. Kresbach, Mr. Irving's lawyer, by telephone on Friday were unsuccessful. In previous interviews, however, he has accused the Austrian prosecutors of having political motives in arresting and prosecuting Mr. Irving, saying that Austria wanted to polish its international reputation, tarnished in recent years when the far-right politician Jörg Haider's Freedom Party became part of the federal coalition government.

A spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Otto Schneider, denied any political motivation in the case.

"The law requires that we prosecute people who deny the Holocaust," he said in a telephone interview. "It has happened several times in the last few years."

Mr. Schneider said that Mr. Irving's stated retraction of some of his views through his lawyer would make no legal difference in the present case.

"The defense lawyer can say whatever he wants," Mr. Schneider said. "The trial will determine the truth."

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