Holocaust part of French election

PARIS — The man Marine Le Pen chose to lead her far-right party while she ran for the French presidency has been forced to step down because he praised a Holocaust denier and expressed doubt that the Nazis used poison gas to murder Jews.

In a 2000 interview, her ally, Jean-François Jalkh, said Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust, would have been “impossible” to use in “mass exterminations.”

Le Pen denied that anyone in party leadership would cast doubt on the extermination of 6 million Jews, but said: “Let things be very clear. I abhor these theories.”

Le Pen is one of two to advance to a run-off of the presidential race, and she announced Monday that she would temporarily step down as leader of the National Front to focus on defeating centrist Emmanuel Macron, considered the favorite in the May 7 election.

Since she became the National Front leader in 2011, she has been trying to “un-demonize” the party and the legacy of anti-Semitic and racist comments made by its founder, her father, JeanMarie Le Pen. Expelled from the party in 2015, he once called the gas chambers a “detail” of history.

During the 2000 interview, a doctoral student, Magali Boumaza, had asked Jalkh about the gas chambers. Jalkh said he was not a “negationist” but that he had read the works of a “trustworthy revisionist”: Robert Faurisson, a former professor of history at the University of Lyon who has been convicted of inciting hatred and racial discrimination.

Jalkh has denied giving the interview, but Boumaza said she recorded the comments.