French Holocaust denier who fled to Scotland jailed

A French Holocaust denier who spent two years on the run in Scotland has been jailed for 12 months.

Vincent Reynouard was arrested in Anstruther, in Fife, in November 2022 and handed over to French authorities last year after he lost a legal battle against his extradition.

The 56-year-old was wanted for inciting hatred and denying the occurrence of the Holocaust.

On Wednesday, he was jailed on condition of partial release at the Paris Criminal Centre and also ordered to pay damages of €10,000 – more than £8,300.

He was found guilty of denying war crimes, denying crimes against humanity, and incitement to racial hatred.

Six million Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1941 and 1945. Millions of other people were also persecuted and murdered.

Holocaust denial has been a criminal offence in France since 1990 and Reynouard has several convictions.

He was sentenced to four months in 2020 and six months in January 2021.

Reynouard was arrested by Police Scotland officers at an address in Anstruther on 10 November 2022.

He was reported to have been living in the town, in the East Neuk of Fife, under a false name and working as an online tutor.

In January last year, three judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh rejected Reynouard’s appeal against his extradition.

Lord Justice General, Lord Carloway, said denial of the Holocaust was a “gross insult” to the members of the Jewish and other communities whose members perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi death camp.

He said it was not necessary to be a member of the relevant communities to be “grossly offended by such statements”.

He described other statements Reynouard made about the Jewish community as “antisemitic racism”.

The judge said that although it was not an offence to hold such views or to express them in certain contexts, it was a breach of Communications Act legislation to communicate them to the public on the internet.

Lord Carloway also said seven videos featuring Reynouard amounted to an offence of relative seriousness by Scottish standards.

A French judge had issued a warrant for Reynouard’s arrest in 2022 after he posted the videos online.

It was said he had trivialised a war crime, challenged the occurrence of crimes against humanity and incited the public to hatred or violence because of origin, nation, race or religion.

In one video, Reynouard denied that the 1944 massacre by the Waffen SS, a Nazi military unit, at the French village of Oradour took place – where women and children were burnt alive.

He also denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and claimed the Holocaust was made up of multiple lies, errors or half truths.

He suggested that the corpses found there were not victims of genocide but were hundreds of “cripples” who had not survived transport to the camps.

In one video he described Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as “the most slandered man” and said he wanted to “rehabilitate” National Socialism.

Lawyers for Reynouard argued that the videos did not threaten serious disturbance to the community and did not constitute a call to action and that to extradite him would be disproportionate.