France's Front National suspends party official over Holocaust denial

France’s far-right Front National has suspended a regional party official for Holocaust denial after he suggested there was no mass killing in the Nazi concentration camps, in comments that dealt a setback to Marine Le Pen's attempts to sanitise her party's image weeks before a presidential election.

Benoît Loeuillet, head of the FN in Nice, was secretly filmed making the comments by the C8 Channel, which will be broadcast in a documentary. “I don’t think there were that many deaths ... during the Shoah,” he is heard saying, referring to the deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Asked by the journalist filming him about Holocaust deniers, Loeuillet, said: “I don’t really know what to think. It’s complicated ... there weren’t 6 million [deaths]. There weren’t mass deaths as we’ve been told.”

Loeuillet denied in a statement on Facebook that he had in any way questioned the reality of the Holocaust and said he had asked his lawyer to sue the documentary-makers for libel. He also said he was resigning from the Front National.

The film-makers, from TV Press Productions, had asked to follow the FN in the Alpes-Maritimes region earlier this year to understand why so many young voters support the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen, a frontrunner for the first round of France’s presidential election at the end of April.

When the party failed to respond to their request, the journalists recorded officials in secret for two months. 

The FN is now threatening to expel Loeuillet, with the FN chief in southern France, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, calling his comments “unacceptable”. In a statement on Wednesday, the party said he had been summoned to a disciplinary hearing that would decide if he was to be thrown out of the FN.

About six million people were killed during the Holocaust, the Nazis' systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish people during World War Two.

The Nazi government also targeted and killed millions of other people, including Roma gypsies, disabled people and imprisoned homosexuals.