A review published under the auspices of the ministry of the economy and finance has rejected a scholarly article on links between French firms and the Nazi war machine.

The rejection came last year, but Toulouse University historian Anne Lacroix-Riz did not make the issue public then because of a "sense of university propriety" and because she had been advised that her career could suffer if she "caused a stir". She changed her mind after a left-wing Catholic journal brought her article to light, which prompted several negationists (who deny that the Holocaust ever took place) to write anonymously to Ms Lacroix-Rix.

In the most sensitive passage of the article for Etudes et Documents, Ms Lacroix-Riz queries the involvement of the French chemicals group Ugine in the war and suggests the 15-fold increase in the capital of one of its subsidiaries between 1941 and 1943 was for the production of Zyklon B, used in the gas chambers.

Officially the firm, a partner of a German company whose group produced Zyklon B, was supplying insecticide. Ms Lacroix-Riz argues that the arrival of German technicians and the "disproportionate escalation" of production could not be accounted for by demand for an insecticide.

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Ms Lacroix-Riz, a Communist party member, has had trouble publishing her work before. A book on the Vatican's pro-German policy, Vatican, l'Europe et le Reich, is finally being released this month after ten years' delay.

Ms Lacroix-Riz's analysis of the attitude of French industry during the occupation differs from that of most French historians, who tend to believe that there is a large grey area between the extremes of collaboration and resistance. Her view is that the French economic elite foresaw long-term economic domination of Europe by the Reich and acted in that perspective.

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The argument over French attitudes and wartime complicity is complicated, however, by restricted access to the relevant archives.

Ms Lacroix-Riz's research is based mainly on German, British and American archives. Six members of the journal's review committee rejected her article. In a response to the journal, published by the Communist party paper l'Humanite, review committee historian Maurice Levy-Leboyer advised against publication because of the "risk" implied for other researchers wanting to use national archives.