In France, at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres... If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees.
Jean-Marie Le PenI have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail.
Jean-Marie Le PenIn recent years - before the intifada - there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that's out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law.
Jean-Marie Le PenThe Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier.
Jean-Marie Le PenHowever, the wind only changes the picture temporarily, the substrate remains the same and sooner or later the same picture surfaces once again.
Jean-Marie Le PenThere was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic. No reason at all. I do not know one person in the National Front who committed even the most minor hostile act against a Jewish person or Jewish property. As for me, even though I have been accused of anti-Semitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior. There just are people, organizations, that need an adversary and they want the public to believe that this adversary is dangerous.
Jean-Marie Le Pen