The trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie has produced a flood of anti-Semitic graffiti and pamphleteering all over France, much of it aimed at high school students in the Paris area.
The most frequent claim is that the Holocaust was a Jewish hoax. A synagogue in Nantes, a city of 223,000 in northwestern France, had its walls daubed with the words “Free Barbie” and “Hitler will live for 1,000 years.” The graffiti was discovered Sunday morning by Rabbi David Azoulay. The local police are investigating.
Elsewhere, anonymous tracts have appeared stating that “No Jews were killed by the Germans who deported them to Eastern Europe because the Jews were the enemy of Germany.”
The tracts add, “The Jews opposed Hitler like they oppose Waldheim now, but a thousand times more.” The reference is to President Kurt Waldheim of Austria, who has been accused of complicity in Nazi atrocities when he served in the German army in the Balkans during World War II.
Barbie, charged with crimes against humanity, is on trial in Lyon where he was the wartime Gestapo chief responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to death camps.
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