ThoughtCrime: 05/05/92
Austrian Revisionist Convicted
Austrian Revisionist publisher Gerd Honsik has been sentenced to 18 months
imprisonment for 14 breaches of a law against "neo-Nazi" activities that
makes it a crime to deny crimes allegedly committed by the Hitler regime.
Honsik, 51, had written in his magazine "Halt!" that hydrocyanic gas
from the insecticide Zyklon was used in the German wartime concentration
camps only to kill vermin in clothing and buildings, but not people.
A criminal court in Vienna convicted Honsik on May 5 under a new Austrian
law that makes it a crime to "deny the Holocaust." The law does not criminalize
"denial" of crimes committed by non-Germans, and is itself a politically-motivated
violation of the principle of free speech and expression.
Court officials said that the verdict menas that two earlier suspended
sentences handed down against Honsik for similar violations in Austria and
Germany would take effect, thus extending his prison sentence to around
three years.
Honsik told the court that he is himself a victim of a campaign against
free speech. "When a country locks someone up because he wrote a book, that
fascism too," he said. Defense attorneys said that Honsik would appeal the
sentence.
Adapted from IHR Newsletter July/Aug 1992 No.88 PO Box 2739, Newport
Beach, CA 92659.
The THOUGHTCRIME ARCHIVES is a series designed as a cooperative effort
to aid and assist the Revisionist community by reporting acts of censorship,
violence, and other outrages perpetrated against revisionists.
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death." George Orwell
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