The Paris Court of Appeals has found the editor of a Holocaust revisionist publication innocent of charges that he grossly understated the number of Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In reaching its decision, the Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s verdict earlier this year which found Alain Guionnet, editor of Revision, innocent of charges that he had broken a law forbidding “the denial of crimes against humanity” when, two years ago, he put up hundreds of posters in Paris claiming that “only” 125,000 people had died at Auschwitz.
“Since the Nuremberg tribunal did not state the number of victims at Auschwitz,” understating the number of concentration camp victims “cannot constitute a questioning of the crimes against humanity as defined by the law,” the judges said, using the same rationale as the lower court.
Officials at CRIF, the umbrella organization representing French Jewry, said they were “shocked and outraged” by the court’s decision.
Jean-Serge Lorach, a lawyer representing Holocaust survivors’ organizations, said he would appeal the verdict to France’s highest court, a process that could take at least a year.
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