David Irving, the discredited British historian and Nazi apologist, was this week starting a three-year prison sentence in Vienna for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Irving, who appeared in court confidently on Monday carrying his book Hitler's War - "my flagship, 35 years of work" - and a PG Wodehouse paperback, immediately vowed to appeal against the sentence. "I'm very shocked," he said as he was led back to the cells where he has been held for the past three months.
Irving, 67, started the day affecting the image of an English gent arraigned before a foreign court. "Frankly, questions about the Holocaust bore me," he said, calling the trial "ridiculous" and claiming that the Austrian law under which he was being tried would be scrapped within a year.
On Tuesday Austrian state prosecutors declared they are to lodge an appeal to try to lengthen the jail term. They said he remained a beacon for the European neo-Nazi movement and had been treated too lightly. The prosecution and defence appeals are likely to go to Austria's supreme court and are unlikely to be heard until late this year. Austria has Europe's toughest law criminalising denial of the Holocaust. Irving went on trial for two speeches he delivered in the country almost 17 years ago. He was arrested in November last year after returning to Austria to deliver more speeches despite an arrest warrant against him and being barred from the country.
In the two 1989 speeches he termed the Auschwitz gas chambers a "fairytale" and insisted that Adolf Hitler had protected the Jews of Europe. He referred to surviving death camp witnesses as "psychiatric cases", and asserted that there were no extermination camps in the Third Reich.
The state prosecutor, Michael Klackl, said: "He's not a historian, he's a falsifier of history." Arguments over freedom of speech were entirely misplaced, he added: "This is about abuse of freedom of speech."
Irving's defence lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, appealed for mercy for an ageing man with a 12-year-old daughter and an ill wife. Even if he did voice views which were "horrible" or "repellent", he was no danger to Austria.
Irving pleaded guilty, but under Austrian law the trial went ahead. Judge Peter Liebtreu called Irving "a racist, an anti-semite, and a liar", citing the verdict delivered by Justice Charles Gray at the high court in London in 2000 when the historian lost a libel case against the US writer and academic Deborah Lipstadt and was bankrupted.
The judge repeatedly asked Irving if he still subscribed to the views articulated in the 1989 speeches. "I made a mistake saying there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz," he conceded. He claimed that the Holocaust figure of 6 million murdered Jews was "a symbolic number" and said his figures totalled 2.7 million.
He said he was not sure how many died at Auschwitz, but he mentioned a figure of 300,000, a fraction of the accepted total. And he still believed that Hitler protected the Jews and tried to put off the Final Solution - the systematic killing of all European Jews - at least until after the war.
This court appearance is the latest in a long line of legal battles in which the far-right historian has been involved stretching back 40 years. He has always portrayed himself as a victim of smear tactics who is seeking to bring to light historical truths. Born in Essex in March 1938, the son of a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, Irving studied physics at Imperial College, London. He did not graduate but won a reputation as a controversialist, going on to publish a string of books on German history. But it was Hitler's War, published in 1977, that was to gain him his greatest notoriety and in which he challenged the accepted historical version of the Holocaust.
America and Germany are in dispute over the fate of a vast trove of Holocaust archives, including files on more than 17 million people. The documents are kept in Germany by the International Tracing Service (ITS), a branch of the international committee of the Red Cross. The German government and ITS insist the personal files cannot be released because of international agreements and German privacy law. But they are under pressure from the US government and Holocaust scholars to make them available.
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