The apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Le Pen's recent Holocaust revisionism

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Ms. Le Pen in an interview said that “France isn’t responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” a reference to the rounding up of more than 13,000 Jews—including some 4,000 children—in July 1942. Nazi occupiers, with the help of the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, crowded the victims into a cycling stadium before dispatching them to concentration camps. The majority were sent to Auschwitz.

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This is an historical evasion. Many French fought the Nazis, but the scale of French collaboration was vast, with some 350,000 French citizens purged or punished postwar for collaboration. Current French President François Hollande and the center-right former President Jacques Chirac have accepted state responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv episode and apologized.

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The comments echoed the National Front of Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie. Mr. Le Pen in 1987 described the Holocaust as a “detail in the history of World War II” and more recently suggested that “Mr. Ebola” could solve the world’s “demographic” problems.

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