Documents on the your Vienna imprisonment A very filthy cell

. . . I lie down and wait for the glaring ceiling light to go out. It stays on all night. December 20, 2006 (Wednesday) Vienna prison (Austria) APPEAL hearing this morning at 9:15 a.m. At six a.m. I am wakened, and I dress in “best” clothes, such as they are.

In view of last night’s remarks by Officer Grobmann , I now have little hope of the appeal succeeding: only three have succeeded at the OLG in recent years, he said; Dr Herbert Schaller [my new defence lawyer] had humanely kept that little statistic from me. Fetched at eight by prison escort party and searched by very friendly officer with a walrus moustache (see the press photos).

I have tucked an Agatha Christie paperback into my blazer pocket, peeping out of the flap; “What’s that book?” he asks, clearly having been told not to let me carry Hitler’s War again. I still slip an open fountain pen into my handcuffed hands: Warenzeichen , I explain to The Walrus: I am a writer… Across Vienna to the Oberlandesgericht at nine in a prison van shared with an unpleasant Eastern European hoodlum; it is unusual to see people, crowds, cars, trees, birds, children.

I had forgotten all about them. In the courtroom I am faced by the usual (to an English eye, unusual ) crush of press photographers and television cameras in the court room; I am obliged to stand there for fifteen minutes while they shoot away with their cameras with the court’s permission. The judge is Maurer , who looks disconcertingly like me, and throughout the two hours he runs his tongue around his lips as though dying or at least in need of water; he looks very frightened.

It does not encourage me. In the public gallery about fifty members of the public have packed in; I spot Réka in the back row, very fetching in a powder blue suit. I invite her over and shake hands before the uniformed heavies surrounding me can stop it. She does not understand a word of course; I indicate I am wearing the tie, trousers, and socks she had given for the cause — mostly bought in China.

Wolfgang Frölich turns up and takes photos, and I think illegally films from the back until he is stopped; lucky they do not realise he has just finished a seven year sentence. Rather alarmingly the young woman Beisitzer (there are five judges) reads out the whole of the Urteil (Judgment) of February 20, in a toneless unaccentuated voice.

At one point where I quoted in my 1989 lectures a particularly shocking 1942 Foreign Office admission that they had invented the gas chamber story for war propaganda ( Auch das war eine Lüge ), I interject: ” Zitat ” — a quotation, i.e., it was not I who had said it. The Oberstaatsanwältin , public prosecutor, speaks for half an hour demanding a stiffer penalty than the three years (and no doubt wishes for a death sentence if humanly possible).

My Dr Schaller follows, an oddly droll, proud looking little man, wiry, red faced and tough, speaking unlike her without notes — because he is an expert — and with great force. How dare the prosecution, he asks, add-in my lectures around the world (which were not about the Holocaust anyway)? They were not illegal anywhere except Austria. Austria can not police the world. He repeats twice that I was not properly defended at the lower level, in February. Quite so.

At Judge Maurer’s invitation I speak for two minutes, pointing out that Judge Peter Liebetreu’s February 2006 Urteil as read out of course only quoted the “prosecutable” parts of my two 1989 lectures, but that if taken as a whole they had been properly balanced pro and con, and that this was why the police officials who actually attended at our invitation each time found (and recorded) that I had not broken the law; that I had been 400 days in Einzelhaft, that Bente is very ill, and that there

could be no exchange of prisoners to the UK as this Austrian law does not exist in the UK — one of the conditions. I.e., I would not see my family for three years, if then. The panel retires to consider their verdict, and I chat with Réka. I have decided it is hopeless, and say goodbye to my friends. I expect the figure to increase to five years now.

David Irving, Hajo Herrmann, Herbert Schaller at Munich trial, 1993 [click for 500 DPI version] TO my surprise however Judge Maurer reads out a verdict — it even seems to me to have been pre-typed — immediately dismissing the prosecution’s case 100 percent, and accepting ours. He licks his lips more frantically than before. I wink at Schaller.

They can not overturn the monstrous Judge Liebetreu’s judgment — because Austria would then have to pay major compensation to me — but they do adjust the sentence to effect an immediate release; time served, in other words. Still an injustice, but what the hell. The gallery takes it very quietly. The press cling around asking questions with an altogether different hue now.

Open season seems to have ended. “Give no interviews in Austria!” demands Dr Schaller loudly, protecting my interests: journalists, as we have found, have a tendency to distort things to create fresh stories. Réka dashes forward and affords me a warm hug which is nice. Fly Hungarian!

At 10:30 a.m., the police drive me back across Vienna to the prison, cracking jokes of an off-colour nature, and educating me that everybody knows I have been the victim of a small religious Menschengruppe , (clique), a people not like us at all. They were the ones really behind my arrest; go on, you don’t say; and I make no response. They clearly like driving around with the notorious; one boasts he has seen Robert Mang, the 4 million euro Saliera thief, a few days ago in the prison building.

Back in Josefstadt prison I am a free man, but I am not. Shortly — despite what Dr Schaller has assured me — I am escorted before the Fremdenpolizei for expulsion proceedings. The aforementioned clique has evidently leapt into action again. Schaller has already left for Mannheim. I refuse to sign any documents, on advice, and am then kept hanging around in the foyer of our cell block until 2:30 pm.

I use the time to phone the Press Association to arrange a press conference in London at 7 pm this evening, and brother John . This call to the PA might easily have become another undoing, as I might still be under Liebetreu’s phone prohibition order; and not allowed to call the press. I am handed today’s mail, thirty more letters; including one from Rym (my long-lost Tunisian friend from 1982), and others of great interest.

I also get through eventually to Bente who is somewhat hostile — because the press are now phoning her — but softens when I mention that (a) I am bringing cash and (b) Vincent B ., a landscape gardener, has named me in his will; I ask her to look him up on my supporters’ list. . . Bente says the BBC is reporting that Judge Liebetreu is livid at the overturning of his judgment and is searching for ways to detain me pending a fresh prosecution.

Inspector Hornicek [ our cell block chief ] confirms, Liebetreu is refusing the release pending the arrival of the paper warrant — it is just a pretext. AT 2:30 pm a very unpleasant period begins; Hornicek has shown up again and smilingly invites me to