DEUTSCHE WELLE: Ultra-conservative bishop Richard Williamson has been fined 10,000 euros for denying aspects of the Holocaust in an interview for Swedish television. He made the comments while on German soil.
A court in the Bavarian city of Regensburg has fined a conservative British bishop 10,000 euros ($13,500) for partial Holocaust denial in a television interview.
Bishop Richard Williamson did not attend the hearing, and his lawyer said he was instructed not to by his ultra-conservative order, the Saint Pius X Society.
"Bishop Williamson would gladly have come," defense lawyer Matthias Lossmann told the court in Regensburg, "but the Saint Pius X Society suggested he did not. To be precise, they forbade him from coming."
While the maximum sentence for Holocaust denial - a criminal offence in Germany - is five years in prison, the court in Regensburg had said in the run-up to the trial that a fine would be the most likely outcome in the case of a guilty verdict.
The clergyman had already incurred a 12,000-euro fine for a 2008 Swedish television interview he gave from the Saint Pius X seminary near Regensburg. Because Williamson refused to pay this, the Regensburg court elected to open criminal proceedings against him.
In the interview he argued that only "200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps," and further argued that gas chambers had not been used as a method of mass-execution. The German issue >>> msh/dl/AP/AFP, Editor: Chuck Penfold | Friday, April 16, 2010
