White House press secretary Sean Spicer attempted to clean up his instantly controversial claim that Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” Tuesday by conceding that Hitler had brought chemical agents into the “Holocaust center.”
“I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Ashad [sic] is doing … there was not in the — he brought them into the Holocaust center, I understand that, but I’m saying in that the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down, to innocent, into the middle of towns, it was brought, the use of it,” Spicer said. “I appreciate the clarification, that was not the intent.”
His comments came shortly after he compared Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical attack to what he claimed was Hitler’s lack of chemical weapons use.
Hitler used Zyklon B as an agent to mass-execute prisoners in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,” Spicer later said in a statement following the briefing. “I was trying to draw contrast of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers.”
