Austrian Gottfried Kuessel has his handcuffs removed in a courtroom in Vienna
Austrian Gottfried Kuessel has his handcuffs removed in a courtroom in Vienna (Reuters)

A prominent Austrian neo-Nazi figure has been sentenced to nine years in jail for his involvement in launching a far-right website that propagated Nazi ideology.

Gottfried Kuessel, 54, was arrested in April 2011 along with two accomplices for setting up the Alpen-Donau website.

The servers for the site were based in the United States so Austrian authorities had to get American cooperation to purseu the trio.

Kuessel denied any wrongdoing and told the court he had abandoned neo-Nazi ideology after serving a jail term in the 1990s for spreading Nazi propaganda. On that occasion, he denied the Holocaust and said the diary of Ann Frank was a fake.

Kuessel's attorney, Michael Dohr, said he would appeal against his latest conviction.

"I had expected an acquittal because of the very thin evidence. There was only circumstantial evidence, not more," he said.

Austria, which was the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and was the first place to be annexed by the Third Reich, has very strict anti-Nazi laws. Its Jewish population was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust.

But Jewish leaders have lamented a surge in anti-Semitism across the country.

A rabbi claimed in September that neo-Nazi soccer fans had verbally abused him while police looked on. A far right politician, Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader leader of the Freedom Party, caused a controversy by posting a cartoon on Facebook that was seen as anti-Semitic.

Facebook