Nazi past big factor in race for president

PARIS — France’s troubled wartime past is taking center stage Friday in the country’s highly charged 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.

Seeking the moral high ground, Macron wants to send a message to voters that Le Pen isn’t a candidate like any other, but the heir of a party stained by anti-Semitism, racism and an outdated worldview.

Le Pen’s years-long efforts to detoxify her party’s image — efforts that have brought her one step away from the presidency — endured a new setback Friday, when the leader of her National Front party quit because of an uproar over past remarks allegedly questioning the Nazi gas chambers. Le Pen later said she “abhors” Holocaust doubters.

French emotions around France’s history of collaborating with the Nazis remain raw, seven decades after the war’s end. The country has never undergone a national atonement; instead many people still view the actions of the collaborationist Vichy regime as a historical anomaly instead of atrocities committed by the French state.

Macron sought to bring the horrors of the Holocaust home to voters with his visit Friday to Oradour-sur-Glane, a ghost town left behind after the largest massacre in Nazioccupied France. The town is today a phantom village, with burned-out cars and abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history.

On June 10, 1944, four days after the Allied DDay landings in Normandy, an SS armored 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.

Only six people survived.