Paris court this week sentenced Vincent Reynouard, a 57-year-old French Holocaust denier, to eight months in prison after he claimed that Nazi gas chambers did not exist.
In articles published in 2024 and 2025 in the far-right magazine Rivarol, Reynouard described the murder of Jews in gas chambers as “Soviet propaganda” and “fabricated stories,” and argued that such killings were technically impossible. He was also convicted of antisemitic insults after describing Jews as “pathogens.”
Serial Holocaust denier Vincent Reynouard
(Photo: Frederick Florin/AFP)
Reynouard, who has accumulated 10 previous convictions since 2006, mostly for denying Nazi crimes, was convicted alongside the magazine’s editor, Jérôme Bourbon. Bourbon, who has 22 previous convictions stemming from material he published in the past, was sentenced to six months in prison to be served at home under electronic monitoring.
The court ordered the two men to jointly pay damages to several organizations, including the Jewish Observatory of France and the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism.
In its ruling, the judge made clear that denying the existence of gas chambers is not merely a dispute over technical details, but a challenge to a central element of the extermination of European Jewry.
According to Agence France-Presse, the court ruled that “by denying the existence of the gas chambers, the defendant denies the existence of the Holocaust by casting doubt on one of its principal methods.”
Denial of crimes against humanity as established by the Nuremberg trials has been a criminal offense in France since 1990.