HISTORY - IS IT BUNK?

A bad British historian who's been widely discredited for years as a crank has been jailed for three years in Austria for denying the 20th century mass murder of European Jewry now known as the Holocaust.

I realise that attempting to re-write history is a dangerous and corrosive practice that could prevent future generations learning from the mistakes of their ancestors.

But correct me if I've got this wrong - I thought it was the Germans (including Austria, which was swallowed up by the Third Reich before the war) who murdered at least five million Jewish people during the Second World War - not a right wing lunatic from Essex.

I wonder whether the energy of the Austrian and German states would have been better employed in the last 60 years bringing to justice those people who built the fences, put up the huts, drove the transport trains, collected the clothing and tallied the numbers, as well as those who dropped the gas canisters through the roofs of the 'shower' blocks?

Oh, but that would have meant some of the people who sat in the Viennese courtroom yesterday as David Irving was convicted, would never have been born. Their grandparents might very well have been executed for what they did if the standard of proof regarding involvement in genocide had been lower.

So the lesson of history is the lesson that a bad British historian signally failed to learn, but that the dwindling band of surviving SS and Wehrmacht soldiers have known for years.

If you want to escape the judgement of the world, make sure you don't stand out from the pack too much. It's much safer to be a clerk in a death camp office, or a low-key racist spouting your opinions in a bar, than it is to be a camp commandant or a bad historian with plenty of media exposure.