White House blunder on Hitler and chemical weapons draws ire

Here is the quote of Sean Spicer saying Hitler didn’t “even sink to using chemical weapons” pic.twitter.com/YvsaU1aFia

— Michael Schwab (@michaelschwab13) April 11, 2017

The White House press secretary Sean Spicer expressed regret on national television on Tuesday after he was widely condemned for claiming that Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons.

Comparing the Nazi leader with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Spicer told journalists during his regular press briefing at the White House: “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

The Syrian town of Khan Sheikhun, in the Idlib province, was hit by a sarin gas attack on 4 April, killing at least 80 people and saw dozens suffer respiratory problems and symptoms including vomiting, fainting and foaming at the mouth.

The US blamed the Syrian regime for the attack. The Syrian government has denied involvement.

When asked to clarify his remarks, Spicer added: “I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.”

A reporter in the room shouted that Jews had been targeted. Stuttering and gesticulating, Spicer stumbled on: “Thank you, I appreciate that. There was not in the – he brought them into the Holocaust centres – I understand that. But I’m saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down into the middle of towns.

“So, the use of it, I appreciate the clarification. That was not the intent.”

In an early evening appearance on CNN, Spicer apologised for making the "inappropriate and insensitive" comparison to the Holocaust.

“I was obviously trying to make a point about the heinous acts that Assad had made against his own people last week, using chemical weapons and gas. Frankly, I mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison,” Spicer said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer. “And for that I apologise. It was a mistake to do that.”

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust. I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centres. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable," he added.

More than 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, along with large numbers of Gypsies, homosexual people, political dissidents and others. Many were killed in gas chambers with chemical gas agents such as Zyklon B.

The statement came on the first day of Passover, the Jewish holiday which commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The holiday is one of the holiest days in Judaism and has been used a metaphor for the oppression that Jews faced throughout history, including under Nazi Germany.