Berliner Tageszeitung - French Holocaust denier jailed for eight months

Holocaust denial has been a criminal offence in France since 1990.

Vincent Reynouard, already convicted 10 times since 2006, mainly for denying crimes against humanity, was charged over articles that appeared in a far-right magazine in 2024 and 2025.

Writing for Rivarol, Reynouard, 57, described the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps as "Soviet propaganda" and "made-up stories".

He also argued that "large gas chambers for a thousand people" were a "technical impossibility".

"By denying the existence of the gas chambers, a symbol of the extermination of the Jews regardless of their size or capacity, the defendant is denying the existence of the Holocaust through the questioning of one of its principal methods," the court said in its ruling, which was seen by AFP.

Reynouard was also convicted of antisemitic insult for describing Jewish people as "pathogenic".

"He thus reduces Jewish people to a germ that is a source of infection," the judges said.

Rivarol's editor Jerome Bourbon, whose criminal record contains 22 convictions, was sentenced to six months in prison, to be served under electronic monitoring at home.

The two men were also ordered to jointly pay damages to several groups, including the Jewish Observatory of France and the League Against Racism and Antisemitism.

O. Petrow--BTZ