FRANCE’S DARK NAZI HISTORY COLOURS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

PARIS France’s wartime past took centre stage Friday in the presidential race, as centrist Emmanuel Macron visited the site of France’s worst Nazi massacre and Marine Le Pen’s far-right party suffered a new blow over alleged Holocaust denial.

Macron toured Oradoursur-Glane, a ghost town left behind after the largest massacre in Nazi-occupied France. The town is today a phantom village, with abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history.

On June 10, 1944, four days after the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy, an SS armoured division herded villagers into barns and a church, blocked the doors, and set Oradour-sur-Glane ablaze. A total of 642 men, women and children died.

Meanwhile, interim National Front leader JeanFrancois Jalkh resigned Friday over comments reported in a 2000 interview in which he allegedly cast doubt on the truth of Nazi gas chambers.