Uproar after French MP denies gays deported from Nazi-occupied France

Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling right-wing UMP party has taken action against one of its MPs who denied that homosexuals were deported from France during World War II.

www.devoiretmemoire.org

Christian Vanneste can be seen on the internet site www.libertepolitique.com declaring that homosexuality is “the refusal of the other”, and talking of what he calls “the famous myth about the deportation of homosexuals [from France]”

UMP leader Jean-François Copé told journalists that members at the party’s weekly meeting on Wednesday were unanimous in their condemnation of Christian Vanneste’s comments, which he called “unacceptable, profoundly shocking and intolerable.”

Copé said that Vanneste will not be able to stand for the UMP in legislative elections in June, it was decided at the meeting, and the question of expulsion was to be discussed at a meeting next week.

Copé declared that the UMP would put up a candidate to oppose Vanneste in the legislative elections.

In 2007 Vanneste had the party backing withdrawn after making homophobic comments, but on that occasion he succeeded in keeping his parliamentary seat, largely because the UMP did not put up a candidate to stand against him.

This time around even the Front National rebuked Vanneste. The party’s number two Louis Aliot said “Monsieur Vanneste should re read his history books. It’s a really stupid thing to say.”

French historian Mickaël Bertrand, who led a team of researchers who produced a report on the question, suggests that 62 people were deported from France to German camps or prisons, because of their homosexuality.

French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld says that he has never seen a document relating to the deportation of homosexuals in France. He says that German law on the arrest of homosexuals was never introduced in France, except in parts of France which at the time were German, such as Alsace.

The French group Les oublié(e)s de la mémoire (Forgotten by history) campaigns for greater recognition of the homosexual victims of the Nazi holocaust.
 

The question of whether or not to legalise gay marriage in France is moving up the political agenda ahead of presidential and legislative elections this spring.

The last gay concentration camp survivor, Rudolf Brazda, a German-speaking Czech who had taken French nationality, died in Alsace last year.