David Irving, the British historian, is expected to plead guilty to a charge of denying the Holocaust at his trial in Austria today.Irving's lawyer said his client would admit the accusation when he goes on trial in Vienna. Irving was arrested in Austria on November 11 last year when he arrived to give a lecture to students, and has remained in custody. Austrian laws states that Holocaust denial is a crime.
The charges stemmed from speeches Irving delivered in 1989 in the Austrian capital Vienna and in the southern town of Leoben.
Irving has in the past faced allegations of spreading anti-Semitic and racist ideas. He is the author of nearly 30 books, including Hitler's War, which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.
He once insisted that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the systematic slaughter of six million Jews, and reportedly said there was "not one shred of evidence" that the Nazis carried out their Final Solution on such a scale.
He has also questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted.
But the BBC reported that Irving wrote a letter from his prison cell claiming that some of his views on gas chambers had changed.
| let's see if he uses the trial to grandstand and stir up trouble |