Lithuania to ban infamous British Holocaust denier from entry

Baltic state’s foreign minister reaffirms that minimizing the Jewish genocide in his country is a crime, and thus British Holocaust denier David Irving would not be welcome.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Lithuania’s foreign minister Linus Linkevicius reacted Tuesday to reports that British Holocaust denier David Irving was planning to visit the region in several months by declaring that he would ask for Irving’s placement on the country’s blacklist.

Lithuania’s top diplomat said that since Irving had announced that he would visit neighboring Poland and Latvia in September, he might want to enter Lithuania as well.

“I will turn to the Migration Department shortly with a proposal to put him on the list of unwelcome persons,” Linkevicius told BNS Lithuania.

“Denying the Holocaust and glorifying Adolf Hitler is a crime in Lithuania,” Linkevicius said, adding that “such persons are unwelcome in Lithuania and spreading of such views is unacceptable.”

Someone who publicly condones or grossly trivializes the Nazis’ or Soviet Union’s crimes can face up to two years in prison according to Lithuanian law.

Poland’s foreign minister said on Friday that Irving would not be allowed into his country, as “negation of the Holocaust is not allowed by Polish law.”

His decision was made in response to Israeli government officials’ requests following the publication in a British Jewish paper last week of Irving’s publicized plan to tour Nazi sites in September.

Irving is already persona non grata in New Zealand and in Austria, where he was jailed for a year in 2005-2006 for Holocaust denial.

Irving has written several books of revisionist history in which he argued that Hitler did not know of the mass murder of the Jewish people or even opposed it. In 1988, he began spreading the lie that the Holocaust was fiction and and no one was gassed to death at Auschwitz.

His reputation as a Holocaust denier was sealed in 1997 when he lost a libel suit he’d filed against historian Deborah Lipstadt for calling him out in her book “Denying the Holocaust.” He was ordered to pay all trial costs, estimated at some $3.2 million, and was forced to declare bankruptcy.

The trial was made famous in the 2016 film called “Denial.”