- (AFP) -- One of Austria's most hardline revisionists,
Wolfgang Froehlich, will go on trial for neo-Nazi activities and denying
that the Holocaust happened.
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- Froehlich, 52, has in recent years bombarded Austrian
institutions with material claiming it was impossible for the Nazis to
have killed six million Jews because "the gas chambers were too small".
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- He is a chemical engineer by training and used to be
a member of parliament for Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party, which
has in recent years scandalised Europe with its anti-immigration politics.
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- But the party expelled Froehlich in 1994 after he called
for "an end to the intrusion of multicultural bastards into Austrian
society" at a municipal meeting in Vienna.
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- From the late 1990s, Froehlich cultivated contacts abroad
and in 1998 he testified in the trial of Swiss revisionist Juergen Graf,
according to the Documentation Centre for the Austrian Resistance.
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- Around this time, Froehlich published what he called
"expert opinion" that Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used in gas
chambers, had never been used on people and that the size of the chambers
ruled out mass killing.
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- In 2000, the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest.
But he went underground for three years and continued publishing neo-Nazi
propaganda until police finally tracked him down in June this year.
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- Froehlich's most notorious missive was a 300-page book
entitled "The Gas Chamber Fraud", in which he argued that the
Holocaust was nothing but a mass deception of the German people.
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- Its aim, he said, was to help Jews establish a new world
order.
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- These writings were distributed in 2001 and later put
onto a CD. Froehlich allegedly sent copies of the CD to around 800 Austrian
companies and organisations, including youth groups.
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- If convicted, Froehlich could be sentenced to up to 10
years in prison but observers say they expect a lighter penalty.
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- Sentences of "no more than two or three years"
seemed to be the norm in such cases, said Michael Lasek from the Vienna-based
documentation centre, which keeps record of both Nazi activities and efforts
to combat it.
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- The last Austrian to be tried for neo-Nazi activities
and Holocaust revisionism was Walter Ochensberger, who was jailed last
year for eight months, suspended for two years.
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- Lasek told AFP he believed Austria was home to "hundreds"
of neo-Nazis, who included a "hard core of about 200" revisionists.
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- "The neo-Nazis, and certainly the skinheads, seem
to have gained ground in Austria in the past two years," he said,
attributing this in part to fears that foreigners could steal Austrians'
jobs.
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