John Gudenus is an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n retired member of the Federal Council of Austria

Federal Council of Austria

The Federal Council of Austria or Bundesrat is the second chamber of the Austrian parliament, representing the nine States of Austria on federal level. As part of a bicameral legislature alongside of the National Council of Austria , it can be compared with an upper house or a senate...

 on a free mandate (formerly as a member of the Freedom Party of Austria

Freedom Party of Austria

The Freedom Party of Austria is a political party in Austria. Ideologically, the party is a direct descendant of the German national liberal camp, which dates back to the 1848 revolutions. The FPÖ itself was founded in 1956 as the successor to the short-lived Federation of Independents , which had...

), and colonel of the Austrian Bundesheer.

In 2006, Gudenus received a one-year suspended sentence for breaking the Verbotsgesetz, Austria's laws against denying or diminishing the Holocaust. Gudenus had suggested that it was necessary to verify the existence of gas chambers in the Third Reich and later remarked that there had been gas chambers in Poland but not in the Third Reich.

Austria's Der Standard

Der Standard

Der Standard is an Austrian national daily newspaper which is published in Vienna . It was founded by Oscar Bronner as a financial newspaper and the first edition was published on 1988-10-19...

newspaper argued that these two remarks were "cynical and humiliating", and shows contempt for the Verbotsgesetz.