STRASBOURG, FRANCE (REUTERS) - The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to lift the immunity of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, clearing the way for him to face trial in Germany for alleged anti-Jewish comments. The assembly voted by 420 to 20 with six abstentions in favour of a request from Bavarian state prosecutor Helmut Meyer-Staude to let Le Pen go to trial for alleged remarks reportedly referring to the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis as a mere detail of history. Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant National Front Party, stood up and bowed to the assembly and made a dismissive wave as the result of the vote was announced. It was the third time the EU assembly had lifted his immunity and the seventh time it had been requested. Pauline Green, leader of the majority Socialist Group in the assembly, said it was only the second time the Parliament had responded to a request from the authorities of one EU member state to lift the immunity of a deputy from another. The remarks were allegedly made by Le Pen at the Munich launch of the biography Le Pen the Rebel written by a German right-wing extremist. It is illegal in Germany to trivialise or deny the holocaust. The maximum sentence for the offence known as the Auschwitz lie is five years in jail and a stiff fine. In a parliamentary debate on Monday Le Pen said he had neither denied nor trivialised the holocaust. Why should a statement ‘gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War‘ be a criminal negation? I have never denied the existence of the gas chambers, nor have I minimised the subject, he told the assembly on Monday. Green told a news conference just ahead of the vote that Le Pen‘s views on the holocaust were totally unacceptable to those of us in this Parliament given that this Parliament was born on the ashes of the holocaust. In a separate case a French court convicted Le Pen earlier this year of assaulting a French Socialist woman politician and stripped him of his civil rights for two years. The decision by the Versailles court could mean Le Pen being ineligible to run in next year‘s European elections.