An Austrian judge on Friday denied a request for bail for the British historian David Irving, who is accused of violating the country's laws against denying the Holocaust.

The ruling meant that Mr. Irving, 67, whose highly eccentric and widely rejected views of Nazi history have gained him worldwide notoriety, will remain in prison for at least four more weeks while Austrian prosecutors prepare an indictment against him.

Austria, which was annexed to Germany before World War II, was a part of the Third Reich until it was liberated by Soviet and American troops a few months before the Nazis' defeat in 1945. It is one of a handful of countries that have laws forbidding the expression of the opinion that the Holocaust, the Nazis' mass slaughter of Jews during the war, did not take place. Other countries with such laws are Germany itself, France, Belgium and Poland.