According to reports, on 15th October 2002, an employee of La Voix Du Nord refused to publish an obituary in which mention was made of the fact that the deceased’s partner was a survivor of the concentration camps and that her late husband had been “executed by Nazi collaborators in 1944”. The person demanded that these sentences be deleted from the obituary. He explained that the newspaper is not interested in upsetting the radical right, adding that not everyone agrees that there actually were concentration camps.
The matter was publicized, and over the weekend caused considerable furor in France. The newspaper’s management explained that they “simply did not want the members of the deceased family to be in the gunsights of the radical right”. The paper’s representatives apologized to a relative of the deceased and subsequently published the obituary in its entirety. No disciplinary action was taken against the employee.
