Once again, allegations of Holocaust denial have landed on the doorstep of France’s far-right National Front, reports The Washington Post.
When Marine Le Pen stepped down Tuesday as the head of France’s far-right party — in what analysts described as a calculated move to broaden her appeal before the final round of France’s presidential election — she ultimately left the party under the control of Jean-François Jalkh.
But Jalkh has something of a past.
In a string of on-the-record remarks he made in 2000, he was recorded on tape saying that it was “impossible” that the Nazis used Zyklon B, the infamous poison gas used to murder millions of Jews and others in concentration camps during World War II.
“Me, I consider that from a technical point of view it’s impossible, I say impossible to use it in … mass exterminations,” he said in the interview, a transcript of which was first unearthed Wednesday by a journalist with France’s La Croix newspaper.
“Why?” Jalkh asked. “Because it takes several days before decontaminating a room … where Zyklon B was used.”
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Nazis judged Zyklon B pellets — which became lethal when exposed to air — as the fastest and most efficient means of mass murder. At Auschwitz, for instance, the substance was used to gas as many as 6,000 Jews each day.
By Friday morning, National Front officials — after a considerable media firestorm — announced that Jalkh would be replaced as the party’s interim head by Steeve Briois, a popular National Front mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, a town in France’s industrial north where Le Pen hosted her watch party on the night of the vote’s first round.