A French writer has been sentenced to eight months in prison and ordered to pay damages to Jewish groups for saying Nazi Germany did not use gas chambers during World War 2.
Vincent Reynouard, 57, wrote in articles for right-wing magazine Rivarol in 2024 and 2025 that “large gas chambers for a thousand people” were a “technical impossibility”, calling them “Soviet propaganda” and “made-up stories”.
A Paris court on Tuesday convicted Reynouard of “disputing the existence of crimes against humanity”, in addition to “anti-Semitic insult” for describing Jews as “pathogenic”.
“By denying the existence of the gas chambers, a symbol of the extermination of the Jews regardless of their size or capacity, the defendant is denying the existence of the Holocaust through the questioning of one of its principal methods,” the court said in its ruling, AFP reported.
The judges stated that Reynouard’s use of the word pathogenic “thus reduces Jewish people to a germ that is a source of infection”.
Rivarol editor Jerome Bourbon was also given a six-month jail sentence, to be served at home under electronic monitoring, and both men were ordered to pay damages to multiple groups, including the Jewish Observatory of France and the League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism.
Reynouard had 10 similar previous convictions, mainly for denying crimes against humanity, which was made illegal in France in 1990 under a law named after the French Communist Party MP who proposed it.
He was arrested in Scotland in 2022 after spending two years on the run living in a fishing village near Fife under a fake name while working as an online tutor, and was extradited to France in 2024.
A French judge had issued a warrant for his arrest over seven videos he shared online where he made similar comments about gas chambers, questioned whether a massacre took place, described Adolf Hitler as “the most slandered man”, and said he wanted to “rehabilitate” National Socialism.
Reynouard was then found guilty in March last year of denying war crimes, denying crimes against humanity, and incitement to racial hatred. He was jailed for 12 months on condition of partial release and ordered to pay damages of €10,000.
Header image: Vincent Reynouard (YouTube).
