France’s far-right Front National party (FN) has suspended a party official for Holocaust denial after he suggested there was no mass killing in the Nazi concentration camps, reports The Guardian.
Benoît Loeuillet, head of the FN in Nice, was secretly filmed making the comments, which will be broadcast in a documentary. “I don’t think there were that many deaths ... during the Shoah,” he is heard saying.
Asked by the journalist filming him about Holocaust deniers, Loeuillet, said: “I don’t really know what to think. It’s complicated ... there weren’t six million [deaths]. There weren’t mass deaths as we’ve been told.”
The film-makers, from TV Press Productions, had asked to follow the FN in the Alpes-Maritimes region earlier this year to understand why so many young voters support the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen, a frontrunner for the first round of France’s presidential election at the end of April.
When the party failed to respond to their request, the journalists recorded officials in secret for two months.
The FN is now threatening to expel Loeuillet. In a statement on Wednesday it said he had been summoned to a disciplinary hearing that would decide if he was to be thrown out of the FN.
Last week, one of Le Pen’s opponents in the presidential race, François Fillon, the rightwing candidate, promised to discipline party workers who had published a caricature of his centrist opponent, Emmanuel Macron, that was likened to 1930s antisemitic propaganda.