David Irving has argued that crematoria like those found by U.S. troops at Buchenwald were not used to hide evidence of Nazi genocide. (AP Wide World Photos)

Despite publicly recanting some of his most outrageous assertions, British writer and long-time Holocaust denier David Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison after pleading guilty to telling audiences that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.Irving, 67, looked shocked as the sentence was announced Feb. 20 in Vienna, and his lawyer vowed to appeal. He was the 159th person convicted of Holocaust denial in Austria since 1999, but one of the few to be ordered to prison.

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