BERLIN (AFP)---The head of the German neo-Nazi party NPD, Udo Voigt, has questioned the number of Holocaust deaths and demanded the return of German land lost after World War II, in an interview to be broadcast on Monday.

"Six million cannot be right. At most, 340,000 people could have died in Auschwitz," Voigt said in excerpts from the interview that were released in advance.

"The Jews always say: ’Even if one Jew died that is a crime.’ But of course it makes a difference whether one has to pay for six million people or for 340,000," the head of the National Democratic Party added.

"And that also puts paid to the uniqueness of this big crime, or so-called big crime," Voigt added in comments initially made in an interview with Iranian journalists that was to be rebroadcast on the political programme Report Mainz.

The airing of his remarks come amid a debate over whether to cut-off
funding for the NPD and groups that support it.

The leader of the NPD, which was created in 1964 by former Nazi officials, also demanded the return of "Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Western Prussia, Eastern Prussia and Silesia, regardless of whether it is Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad), Danzig (Gdansk) or Breslau (Wroclaw).

"All these cities are German in our view, and we demand to exercise our rights over them."

The head of the national parliament’s internal affairs commission, Social Democrat Sebastian Edathy, has viewed the interview and said he would file a complaint against the NPD chief.

German politicians last week said they wanted to choke off funding for extremist parties such as the NPD.

But that could prove difficult because the German constitution stipulates that all political parties are to be treated equally, the interior minister of the central state of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, has conceded.

The NPD holds seats in regional parliaments in the eastern states of Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, although it has never been represented in the federal lower house of parliament.

The government has in the past tried to ban the NPD, but failed after it emerged that some members of the party who had given evidence in legal proceedings were police informers.