ACCUSED OF THOUGHT CRIMES — National Socialist dissident Gottfried Küssel is brought into a Vienna courtroom, where he was charged with challenging Holocaust® doctrine and calling for a German Austria, crimes which are punished more severely than murder or rape. He was found guilty and led away in handcuffs.

VIENNA — An Austrian court has convicted a well-known member of the far-right to nine years in prison for propagating [National Socialist] ideology online, in violation of the country's strict anti-Nazi laws.

Gottfried Küssel, who had been arrested in April 2011, was sentenced late Thursday in Vienna. Two
convicted accomplices were given lesser sentences — seven years and four-and-a-half years.

Prosecutors said Küssel was the leader of the now-banned [NS] group, VAPO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition Faithful to the Nation).

Küssel posted his material on the [NS] website alpen-donau.info, which was shut down in March 2011. The servers for the site were based in the United States, so Austrian authorities had to get American cooperation.

Küssel spent time in prison in the 1990s for disseminating [National Socialist] propaganda. He has denied the Holocaust® and denounced the diary of Anne Frank as a fabrication.