June 10



FRANCE:

Teacher jailed for making revisionist Nazi film


A TEACHER banned from working in France for peddling revisionist views on
the Holocaust has been sentenced to two years in prison by a French court
after he made a film contesting a brutal Second World War massacre by Nazi
SS storm-troopers.

The conviction of Vincent Reynouard, 33, coincides with the 60th
anniversary today of the slaughter of 642 villagers, including 245 women
and 207 children, at Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June, 1944, four days after
the D-Day landings by Allied forces.

In his film entitled The Tragedy of Oradour-sur-Glane: 50 Years of
Official Lies, Reynouard blamed the inhabitants of the tiny Limousin
village for their fate.

Disputing evidence of eyewitness survivors, the former teacher denied that
the SS deliberately killed more than 350 women and children after rounding
them up and ordering them into the village church, arguing that the deaths
were due to explosives concealed in the church by members of the French
Resistance active in Oradour.

Reynouard had sent videos of his film, along with order forms for
additional copies, to the last two living survivors of the massacre, the
village memorial centre (now a national war memorial and museum) and to
the mayor of Oradour and numerous villagers.

Reynouard was first convicted in 1991 of distributing revisionist
literature when he was a student in Caen, in Normandy. Six years later he
was sacked from his post as a maths teacher at a technical college in
nearby Honfleur, after he set homework involving counting Dachau
concentration-camp victims and was discovered to have stored revisionist
documents denying the Holocaust on the school computer.

Reynouard was eventually banned from teaching anywhere in France. He also
wrote a revisionist book questioning the Nazi slaughter entitled The
Oradour Massacre: A Half-Century of Theatre.

In 1998, some 500 French and German copies of the book were seized by
police in Brussels and the Flemish port city of Antwerp at the request of
French judicial authorities.

Reynouards sentence was handed down by the Limoges appeals court, which
said that his film had insulted the memory of those who had been
massacred.

The court doubled his original prison sentence, but reduced his fine of
10,000 (6,688), ordering him instead to pay 1,000 (668) in damages to each
of the three civil parties in the case, including Marcel Darthout, one of
the last two survivors of the massacre still alive today.

Today, only the stone skeleton of the original Oradour-sur-Glane remains.
The late president Charles de Gaulle ordered that the charred ruins of the
village should be left as a memorial to the suffering of France under the
Nazi occupation and a new village was constructed nearby.

A rusting bicycle, a blackened iron bedstead and the charred wreckage of a
baby carriage are still standing as a chilling reminder of the horrific
events of that spring afternoon when Hitlers troops razed the village to
the ground and murdered its inhabitants.

The massacre is believed to have been a reprisal for a French Resistance
attack which killed 40 Germans following the D-Day invasion.

The SS Das Reich storm-troopers were heading for Normandy when they were
ordered to attack the village, a sleepy backwater near Limoges with little
Resistance activity. Many historians have argued that the Nazis attacked
Oradour-sur-Glane in error after mistaking it for nearby
Oradour-sur-Vayres, a suspected Resistance stronghold about 15 miles away.

On their arrival, the SS rounded up children and women, many carrying
babies in their arms, and marched them to the village church, where they
locked them inside before throwing in grenades filled with poison gas, and
opening fire.

As those who survived screamed for mercy, the SS built a human bonfire by
throwing wood on to their badly injured bodies and setting it alight. Only
one woman escaped from the church, by throwing herself from a 12ft-high
altar window.

Among the 60 troops who perpetrated the massacre were 14 French nationals
from the eastern region of Alsace, of whom all but one had been
conscripted by force.

(source: The Scotsman)