One of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers – well known to UK nazis and revisionists – was last week sentenced by an appeal court in Paris to 12 months house arrest. Vincent Reynouard will be required to wear an electronic tag and was ordered to pay €1,500 damages to the leading French anti-racist organisation LICRA.

Yet within hours of the verdict, Reynouard stated that he would defy the court.

He is refusing to pay any damages, and says he will continue with his Holocaust denial and other rewriting of history to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and his French collaborators.

Whitewashing nazism

Reynouard’s attempts to whitewash nazism date back more than 35 years.

His first conviction (like one of his latest) was for shameless efforts to deny the existence of gas chambers used by Hitler’s SS and their allies to murder millions of victims – mostly Jews – during the Second World War.

The second offence for which he was sentenced last week was his attempt to deny and distort one of that war’s worst massacres, when members of a Waffen-SS panzer division killed 642 civilians including 247 women and 205 children in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

Reynouard’s motives are unsurprising. He was once active in the violent French nazi party PNFE, which had close British connections during the 1990s.

PNFE leader Claude Cornilleau spoke at BNP rallies in England, and BNP leader John Tyndall spoke at the PNFE headquarters in France.

This party was known for its violent criminality. Three of its former members desecrated a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras in 1990, in one of the most notorious antisemitic crimes of those years. After the PNFE was closed down for persistent nazi violence in 1999, another former member attempted to assassinate President Jacques Chirac during the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris in 2002.

Repeated convictions

By this time Reynouard had moved on to the antisemitic Catholic movement SSPX, though he is understood to have lost his faith in later years. He followed another Frenchman Robert Faurisson to become one of the leaders of the Holocaust denial movement.

After repeated criminal convictions during the 2010s, Reynouard fled to London to avoid imprisonment and was safehoused in a property belonging to the wife of a Belgian nazi, Siegfried Verbeke.

Searchlight monitored his contacts with prominent British extremists, including Faurisson’s final conference in 2018 in Shepperton, West London, where Reynouard was among the speakers.

In 2021 when London police moved in to arrest him, Reynouard fled again, this time to Scotland where he lived in a village near St Andrews.

Reynouard’s arrest by Scottish police in November 2022 made headlines, and he was again supported by a network of fellow Holocaust deniers including Faurisson’s old friends at the Anglo-American nazi magazine Heritage & Destiny.

Banned group

Since his extradition to France in February 2024, Reynouard has continued to scoff at the courts. He repeatedly addresses meetings organised by fellow antisemites including the long-established Parisian fascist magazine Rivarol and the hardcore nazis of Jeune Nation, run by former members of yet another banned violent organisation L’Œuvre Française.

Earlier this year Reynouard spoke at an international revisionist conference organised online by another convicted nazi and Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf.

As Searchlight reported, one strange aspect of this conference and the wider movement of Hitlerite apologists is its factional division since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Though he doesn’t speak directly about this subject, Reynouard is closely linked to several pro-Russian nazis including former Le Pen speechwriter Alain Soral and members of Roberto Fiore’s European network of pro-Putin extremists, analysed in several Searchlight articles.

Another of the conference speakers associated with Reynouard during his time in London, former David Irving groupie Lady Michèle Renouf, is even more notorious for her pro-Russian sympathies.

Yet conference organiser Rudolf and some of the other speakers such as Heritage & Destiny’s Peter Rushton are known to be pro-Ukraine.

Scoffing at the law

Even while he struggles to avoid being drawn into these factional disputes, there’s no doubt that Reynouard will continue to scoff at French law, and the system of fines and suspended sentences is proving inadequate.

Wearing an electronic tag is pointless if Reynouard will continue to be allowed to commit further offences with his online interviews, and it seems unlikely that the courts will be able to enforce financial penalties.

Reynouard is known to have benefited from large cryptocurrency payments from fellow nazis, but claims to have negligible earnings. As France stumbles towards a possible takeover by the far right, his case will test the resolve of the judicial system.