The Simon Wiesenthal Center has demanded that French authorities take action against the recent decision of the University of Nantes to grant a doctoral degree for a dissertation which denies that six million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps.
The thesis, written by Henri Roques, was first rejected by the University of Paris IV. It was then submitted to a jury at the University of Nantes, which awarded Roques a doctorate of philosophy for his Holocaust thesis.
A delegation from the Simon Wiesenthal Center learned of the details of this affair during a recent meeting in Paris with Jean-Pierre Lafon, Prime Minister Jaques Chirac’s advisor on human rights and diplomatic affairs.
Upon learning of Roques’ dissertation and its disposition at the University of Nantes, Wiesenthal Center associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper wrote to Rene Maunoury Minister of National Education of France, asking on behalf of the Center’s 315,000 member families what steps the French education authorities were taking against the Nantes University.
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