French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen will face trial for saying the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two had not been "particularly inhumane", a judicial source said today.
The conservative government, anti-racism organisations and Jewish groups sharply condemned Le Pen's comments last year, when they were published in an interview with right-wing weekly magazine Rivarol.
"In France, at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, although there were some blunders, inevitable in a country of 550,000 sq km," Le Pen had said. French anti-racism laws have made denying the Holocaust a crime, punishable by fines or prison.
Mr Le Pen would be tried for "complicity in contesting crimes against humanity and complicity in justifying war crimes", the judicial source said, without giving a date for the trial.
Mr Le Pen, who in 1987 dismissed the Holocaust as a "detail" of history, alarmed Europe in 2002 by reaching the second round of France's presidential election on an anti-immigrant and anti-Europe platform.
Mr Le Pen is seeking to run again in the 2007 presidential poll. If the court convicted him and he lost his eligibility, Mr Le Pen would still be able appeal the verdict - postponing a final ruling until after the poll and allowing him to run.
Paris prosecutors and a group representing the children of Jews deported from France during World War Two had called for judicial investigations into Mr Le Pen's comments last year.
During the Nazi German occupation of France from 1940 until 1944, about 76,000 Jews were deported. Only some 2,500 returned.