The leader of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, Nikos Michaloliakos, claimed on Tuesday that Nazi concentration camps did not use ovens and gas chambers to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust.
"There were no ovens — it's a lie. I believe it's a lie. There were no gas chambers either," Michaloliakos said in an interview with Greece's private Mega television, broadcast on Sunday.
The extreme right political party, whose logo closely resembles a swastika, received seven percent of the vote in the recent elections, giving them 21 parliament seats out of 300.
Government spokesman Pantelis Kapsis described the leader’s remarks as an "extreme insult to the memory of millions of Holocaust victims." The spokesman then went on to accuse the 55-year-old party leader of "distorting history."
"I condemn these views in the strongest terms," he said. "The Greek people have not forgotten that they too mourned the death of hundreds of thousands of people who were victims of the Nazis, among them tens of thousands of Greek Jews. We honor their memory and stand against any attempt to falsify facts and revive intolerance. "
Included in its political platform, the Golden Dawn party seeks to restore national pride to Greece and expel foreigners. The party campaigned heavily on an anti-immigrant platform under the slogan "so we can rid this land of filth."
Furthermore, the party openly displays copies of “Mein Kampf,” as well as other works on Greek racial superiority at party headquarters.
The party symbol has been found at the sites of anti-Semitic attacks in the past.