Laurent Louis, a former member of the Belgian parliament, was told to visit a the preserved death camps where millions of Jews were exterminated as part of Hitler’s final solution and write about the experience on his blog.
A court in Belgium handed Louis, a member of the Belgian far-right, a six-month suspended prison sentence and €18,000 (£15,800) fine for minimising the Holocaust and contesting crimes against humanity, after he downplayed the degree to which Jews were targeted for elimination during the Nazi genocide in an article posted on his blog.
However, the 2015 sentence was scrapped at an appeal court on the condition that Louis, a repented Holocaust denier, embark on an annual pilgrimage to a Nazi concentration camp including Auschwitz and Treblinka.
He was then told to share, in detail, the “eye-opening” experience with his blog readers.
The unusual sentence – the first of its kind – was Louis’s idea, and not the court’s, according to the Belgian newspaper Derniere Heure.
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If Louis fails to visit a death camp at least once a year for the next five years, his original conviction – both the suspended prison sentence and the fine – will be reinstated, judges warned.
Sébastien Courtoy, Louis’s lawyer, said that after the hearing that the court’s decision to swap his client’s suspended sentence and fine with an annual trip to a death camp was “incredibly fair,” adding that it was a “great day” for Belgian justice.
Louis, for his part, once again apologised to those who had been “hurt by his words” in a post published on his Facebook page on Wednesday, adding that the alternative ruling was a “huge victory”.
More than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies during the Holocaust, with scores being sent to concentration camps after being stripped of their possessions.
It is estimated that as many as 1.5 million died in the gas chambers or from forced labour at Auschwitz and 900,000 were killed at Treblinka.