Nice – France’s far-right Front National has
suspended a party official for Holocaust denial after he suggested there was no
mass killing in the Nazi concentration camps.
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 6 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.
The film, called Le FN à la Conquête des Jeunes (The FN:
Winning Over the Young) will be broadcast on Wednesday evening on French TV
channel Canal 8, owned by Canal+.
