Vlaams Belang national party council member Roeland Raes is now on trial in Belgium for Holocaust denial (the decision is supposed to be handed down tomorrow), after a 2001 interview on Dutch TV in which he said:

“I doubt the systematism of the extermination of the Jews and I also doubt the number of deaths, […] and also whether camps such as Auschwitz were all meant to be extermination camps”

A translation of the statements in the video, by LGF reader “superjan:”

Raes: Indeed it happened systematically that they were prosecuted, that they were hauled away. But that it was systematically planned that they would all be killed is another matter.

Interviewer: And the figure of 6.5 million people killed?

Raes: (Nods head) You hear me doubting that.

Interviewer:You doubt that?

Raes: Yes.

An article from the Guardian has more details on Roeland Raes’s Holocaust denial: Belgium’s far right party in Holocaust controversy.

Raes, 67, committed the cardinal sin of any far right party: he said what he really thought in public on the Holocaust. In an interview on Dutch TV he cast doubt on the scale and the extent of the Holocaust to a degree which now leaves him open to prosecution for historical revisionism.

Asked by the presenter if he doubted whether the gas chambers had really existed on a grand scale, Raes replied: “Yes I dare to doubt that. I think that what we’ve been given to believe on certain points has been very exaggerated.

“The persecution and the deportation of the Jews did take place in a systematic way. But whether it was planned that everyone was going to die - well that’s another question.”

When asked if he was willing to accept that 6.5m Jews had been murdered by the Nazis during the second world war he was equally sceptical. “Of course it does seem that a lot of serious things did take place; with the Jews, with the gypsies and also with homosexuals. But to come up with an exact figure - well that’s a completely different question.”

He then went on to enrage Belgium’s large Jewish community by casting doubt on the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diaries, the Jewish schoolgirl who hid from the Nazis in wartime Amsterdam.