FRANCE: Fascist Leader Marine Le Pen Sparks Outrage By Denying French Collaboration With The Nazis

The Local reports:

Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has stirred up deep emotions over France’s World War II history with comments on its collaboration with Nazi Germany, just two weeks ahead of the election. Le Pen said Sunday that “I don’t think France is responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” referring to the roundup and deportation of more than 13,000 Jews from a Paris cycling track ordered by Nazi officers in 1942.

For many — notably Le Pen’s chief rival for the presidency Emmanuel Macron — the remarks were an instant reminder of the candidate’s anti-Semitic, negationist father. The National Front (FN) leader “crossed a red line”, Le Monde said in an editorial, while Jewish groups blasted the comments as “revisionist” and an “insult to France (which has faced up to) its history without a selective memory.”

Israel also slammed Le Pen, with the foreign ministry saying “the declaration is contrary to the historical truth”. Macron said Monday: “It’s the true face of the French far right, the face that I am fighting. If anyone still doubted it, Marine Le Pen is indeed the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.”

Le Pen’s father has been convicted multiple times for inciting racial hatred and denying the Holocaust. Last year he was fined €30,000 for shrugging off Nazi gas chambers as a mere “detail” of WWII.

Yesterday the Washington Post provided the actual history:



The Velodrome d’Hiver is an eternal stain on French history. After dark on July 16, 1942, French police rounded up about 13,000 Jews from across occupied Paris and deposited them in the “Vel d’Hiv,” a famous indoor stadium that had hosted the 1924 Summer Olympics and where the likes of Ernest Hemingway would come to enjoy the races.

From the stadium, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the vast majority of these interned Jews in 1942 were deported to Auschwitz. Most would never return from that World War II Nazi concentration camp. The reason the Vel d’Hiv lingers in France’s national memory is that the roundup was carried out by French police — not by the German occupiers.

In a republic devoted to the lofty ideals of equality and universal citizenship — and that had legally emancipated its Jews long before any of its European neighbors — the Vel d’Hiv roundup exposed the deadly hypocrisy of collaboration with the Nazi regime. In 1995, speaking at the site of the stadium, then-President Jacques Chirac put it this way: “France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and of the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum — France, on that day, committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.”