French Historian Who Dismisses Holocaust Is Beaten

PARIS —  One of France’s leading “revisionist” historians, who claims the Holocaust never took place, was severely beaten Saturday by three youths said to belong to a group called “The Sons of the Memory of the Jews,” officials said.

Robert Faurisson, 60, was ambushed by the youths while walking his dog in a park in Vichy. The trio repeatedly kicked and punched Faurisson, breaking his jaw, then ran off, a police report said.

Faurisson was admitted to a Vichy hospital, then transferred to a hospital in the nearby city of Clermont-Ferrand.

French radio said the attack was claimed by the previously unknown group, which said in a statement that “Faurisson is the first but will not be the last.”

“Let those who deny the Shoah (Holocaust) beware,” it said.

The same group was named as responsible for the attack in a telephone call to a news agency.

“This individual (Faurisson) is the origin of the Carmel of Auschwitz affair that is dividing gravely the Jewish and Catholic communities,” the caller said.

The reference was to the dispute over the presence of a Carmelite convent at the World War II Nazi death camp in Poland.

Faurisson is one of the leading French members of a “revisionist” school of history that says there is no evidence that 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers during the war.