PARIS (AFP-EJP)---French Anti-racism and Jewish groups threatened immediate legal action against the Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, after he repeated previous incendiary comments that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history.”
"I said the gas chambers were a detail of the history of World War II: that, to me, seems so obvious," the 79-year-old Le Pen said in an interview with ‘Bretons’, a regional magazine, published on Friday.
Le Pen was already fined 1.2 million francs (185,000 euros, 290,000 dollars) for
making the initial remarks in an interview on RTL radio in 1987.
When the Bretons journalist told him that the Nazis "deported people to camps simply to kill them," Le Pen replied: "But that is what you believe. I don't feel obliged to adhere to that view."
"I observe that in Auschwitz there was the IG Farben factory, there were 80,000 labourers working there. As far as I know they were not gassed, anyway, nor burned."
The umbrella representative group of French Jewish Institutions, CRIF, said it was “disgusted” by the comments and accused Le Pen, whose political fortunes have recently slumped, of "going even further down the road of revisionism... to draw attention to himself."
SOS racism called Le Pen’s remarks "a pitiful attempt to keep himself in the media eye", while the French Jewish Student Union (UEJF) said it was taking legal action against him.
The International League Against racism and anti-Semitism (LICRA) said it planned to file fresh legal action aginst Le Pen after consulting its lawyers.
And France's Young Socialist Movement (MJS) said it hoped "the courts will not let such remarks go unpunished."
Convicted several times for anti-Semitic and racial comments on World War II
history, Le Pen was handed a three-month suspended jail sentence in February
for describing the Nazi occupation of France as "not especially inhumane".
He was found guilty of denying a crime against humanity and complicity in condoning war crimes, over the remarks made in an interview with a far-right
magazine in 2005.
In 2002 the firebrand leader shocked Europe by making it through to the second round of France's presidential election.
But his party has racked up millions of euros of debts after losing state subsidies thanks to its unexpectedly poor showing in last year's parliamentary elections.
