Holocaust denier at centre of British legal row is jailed for three months in Australia

A man who denies the Holocaust occurred and who was at the centre of a legal row in Britain last year over his claims has been sent to prison for three months in Australia.

Frederick Toben, 64, had avoided being extradited from Britain to Germany for publishing alleged anti-Semitic material on his website in 2008.

But the law was not so favourable to him in his home city of Adelaide today.

Toben, who had already been imprisoned for nine months in Mannheim Prison in 1998 for breaching Germany's Holocaust Law prohibiting anyone from defaming the dead, appeared before Appeal Court judges in Adelaide to fight a conviction of contempt of court.

Frederick Toben, who denies the Holocaust took place, has been jailed for anti-Semitic writings in Australia today

But the Federal Court judges threw out his appeal and ruled that his three-month jail term, originally imposed in May this year, was in no way excessive.

'In our opinion, the sentence of three months cannot, on any stretch of the imagination, be considered excessive or unwarranted,' said the panel of three judges.

Toben was a controversial figure in Britain in November last year when he was released from custody after the German government gave up its battle to have him extradited on charges of racism and anti-Semitism.

On his way from the U.S. to Dubai the previous month, he had been arrested at Heathrow airport on a European arrest warrant taken out by the Germans.

But when Britain refused to hand him over the Germans began an appeal in the High Court - which they later withdrew.

Then in Australia in April this year he was found guilty on 24 charges of contempt for ignoring a 2002 court order preventing him from publishing racist material on his Adelaide Institute website.

Toben's lawyer, David Perkins, suggested at today's hearing that the material published on the Adelaide Institute website, which questioned whether the Holocaust had even occurred, was 'just a drop in the bucket' compared to the amount of revisionist material available on the internet.

But the judges said the case before them was not about the Holocaust, gas chambers or the execution of Jews during World War II. It was about whether Toben had complied with orders of the court.

In his internet publications, Toben has claimed that Hitler had not set out to systematically kill Jews - rather, it was his intention to move Jews with their partners, the Zionists.

He also claimed that Auschwitz, which he has visited, was not a place to kill Jews but was a 'transfer centre'.

It was impossible, he said, for large numbers of Jews to have been murdered there in the four years of World War II.

As for the six million Jews killed during the war, he said this was a 'mythical number' - and anyone who dared to question this and other high numbers faced imprisonment.

In an interview with an Iranian TV network four years ago, Toben indicated that it was his belief that 'Israel is founded on the Holocaust lie'.

That lie, he has continued to maintain, is perpetuated by 'Holocaust racketeers and corpse peddlers.'