I cross-posed with Svi.  But here is the (almost) straight story from The Times:-

David Irving, the historian jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, is free after a court reduced his prison sentence on appeal.

Irving, who was sentenced in February, was released after Vienna’s highest court ruled today that he should serve one year in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

After already serving 13 months behind bars since his arrest in November 2005, Irving had his handcuffs removed today in a small courtroom crowded with his supporters and members of the local press.

“He is free, and he can leave, and he will leave,” said Herbert Schaller, his lawyer, adding that he would advise the historian to leave Austrian soil as soon as possible.

Irving, under strict instructions not to talk to journalists, did not confirm whether he would be flying to Britain but shook hands with his supporters and returned to prison to pick up his belongings.

He left court triumphant and, by coincidence, to a blast of Mozart, which was being played in the courthouse to celebrate the appointment of a local judge.

Irving, 68, entered court this morning with the possibility that his sentence could be increased rather than reduced. After his conviction on February 20, lawyers for both sides had appealed, with the prosecution arguing that the disgraced historian should serve closer to the maximum 10-year sentence allowed under Austria’s stringent Holocaust denial laws.

Irving’s conviction was upheld by Austria’s highest court at an earlier appeal in September.

Just a quick personal observation.  I have never been an Irving supporter.  He gives off the clearest impression of beng an immensely self-destructive fellow, and his website is as anti-semitic as any Jewish race-ace could wish.  But his imprisonment was another issue, of course.  My real disdain is reserved for the Austrian Establishment that legislates such shockingly slavish, unEuropean strictures on free expression as the retrospective law under which he was convicted.

As for Irving the researcher and interpreter of German wartime history, he was bound to deal with facts as he found them, and that he found them wanting might yet one day prove the saving of his reputation rather than the damnation of it.

As for Irving the man, perhaps the rank air of unrespectablity that clings to him is not necessarily something that has solely been pinned there by his semitic foes.  Perhaps it is merely what becomes of a man locked, as he is, in a frightful cosmic struggle with his own worst nightmare.  Perhaps it is just him, and only his own conflicted character drew him to this highly conflicted area of study.

In any event, he will be home in London tonight and it will be interesting to see how he conducts himself from here.  Not much different, I would think.  His first step, I believe, will be the publishing of his very own prison diary.