Beauty Queen Instigates Holocaust Outrage

A former Australian beauty queen has called for the bodies of Holocaust victims to be dug up to see if they really were gassed. Lady Michele Renouf, who was Miss Newcastle 1968 and briefly married to financier Sir Frank Renouf, questioned whether Nazi extermination camps killed six million Jews during World War II. The socialite divorcee was speaking outside a Vienna court where British historian David Irving was jailed for three years yesterday for denying the Holocaust. Irving, 67, pleaded guilty after admitting he'd been wrong to doubt the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews. The charges relate to a lecture he gave 17 years ago in Austria, which was once run by the Nazis. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Austria, the country where Adolf Hitler was born.Socialite Michele Renouf wants Jews exhumed to find out how they died.Irving was arrested when he returned to Vienna in November. Outside court, Lady Renouf, 59, ran the risk of being charged herself when she called for the bodies of "so-called Holocaust victims to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas". Dressed in a pinstripe suit with a Union Jack lapel pin, she praised Irving for "standing up to the Zionists". "I am here to free David Irving and free Austria from this totalitarian law," she said. Formerly Michele Mainwaring, she acquired her title after a brief 1991 marriage to Sir Frank, who described the union as a "nasty accident". Sir Frank terminated the marriage after he found out that far from being the "Countess Griaznoff" she claimed, his wife was in fact the daughter of a Central Coast truck driver. Since then she has become a fixture on the London society circuit and been an outspoken anti-Semite who was kicked out of an exclusive club for her views. She once reportedly called herself the world's "most unsuccessful bimbo". Jeremy Jones, from the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council, described her comments yesterday as "mindbogglingly stupidity even for a supporter of David Irving". Irving has been banned from Australia, where he has a Queensland-based daughter, Beatrice. He will appeal against the jail sentence. with agencies