The government and Jewish community condemned the leader of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn for saying there were no gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps.
Nikos Michaloliakos, whose party won almost 7 percent of the vote in the May 6 election, also challenged the view that six million Jews were killed in the Second World War.
“There were no ovens, this is a lie … there were no gas chambers either,” Michaloliakos said on Sunday in an interview on the private Mega television station.
Golden Dawn, whose members give Nazi-style salutes, won 21 seats in the election.
Michaloliakos said the number of six million Jewish victims was an “exaggeration” and that “many people from different nations” died in German concentration camps, just like many Japanese died in US camps.
“I most categorically condemn such views, which distort history and offend the memory of millions of Holocaust victims,” said government spokesman Pantelis Kapsis.
About 70,000 Greek Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War, most from the northern city of Thessaloniki.
“The election of Nazi nostalgics is a heavy blow for Greek democracy. It is an insult to the history of Greece,” said a statement from the Central Council of Jews in Greece (KIS), who today number about 5,500.
“The Greek people do not forget that they have mourned hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazis, amongst them, tens of thousands of Greek Jews. We honor their memory and we resist any attempt to bring oblivion, or to falsify actual events and to revive intolerance.”
Denying the Holocaust is not a punishable crime in Greece, as it is in other European countries such as Germany and France.
Source: Reuters, Athens News, AMNA