A French court gave far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen a three-month suspended prison sentence today and fined him €10,000 ($14,500) for saying that the Nazi occupation of France was "not particularly inhumane".
Mr Le Pen was found guilty of "justification of war crimes" and "contesting crimes against humanity" in the trial which opened in December.
It centred around a comment Le Pen made in a 2005 interview with right-wing weekly magazine Rivarol, which angered the government, anti-racism organisations and Jewish groups.
The prosecution had requested that Le Pen be handed a five-month suspended sentence and fined €10,000.
Le Pen has always denied any wrongdoing and did not attend the trial. His defence team argued that his remarks were not part of an interview but of a casual conversation.
"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," he was quoted as saying in the magazine.
During the Nazi German occupation of France from 1940 until 1944, about 76,000 Jews were deported. Only 2,500 returned.
In addition, thousands of civilians were shot for acts of resistance.
French anti-racism laws have made denying the Holocaust a crime, punishable by fines or imprisonment.
The court also fined the head of Rivarol magazine, Marie-Luce Wacquez €5,000 and ordered Jerome Bourbon, the journalist who wrote the interview, to pay €2,000.