Be warned that Le Pen’s anti-Semitic rhetoric appeals to many conservatives

If anyone is tempted to follow Jean-Marie Le Pen’s recent attempt to minimise the awful reality of the Holocaust, by accepting his hateful claim “that the Nazi gas chambers were a [mere] detail of history”, perhaps they should listen to the chilling testimony of Oskar Groening, the Auschwitz official now on trial for complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jewish men, women and children.

Giving evidence, Groening matter of factly stated that “the capacity of the gas chambers and the capacity of the crematoria were quite limited”, before qualifying this by admitting “that 5,000 people were processed (exterminated) in 24 hours” (World News, April 24).

Le Pen’s anti-Semitic rhetoric cannot be dismissed by apologists for the far-right who argue that it is simply the rambling xenophobia of a reactionary. harkening back to the ‘good old days’ of a predominantly Caucasian, Christian Europe.