France: Le Pen fined for Holocaust denial
01 January 1998
The Front National (FN) leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was fined 300,000 francs (£30,000) by a court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre in December after repeating that the nazi gas chambers were nothing more than a "detail" in the history of the second world war. Le Pen, who was fined 100,000 francs for making a similar statement in 1987, made the remark in Munich, Germany, while visiting Franz Schoenhuber, a former SS officer and leader of the fascist Der Republikaner organisation, in Germany.