In the third Holocaust comparison made in as many days by politicians, South Carolina Democratic chairman Dick Harpootlian compared his state's Republican female governor, Nikki Haley, to Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, this morning at a breakfast in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Harpootlian reportedly evoked Braun when discussing Haley's press briefing from a basement studio at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Harpootlian was quoted as saying, "She was down in the bunker a la Eva Braun."
Yesterday, a top Kansas Democrat compared Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to Adolf Hitler.
Pat Lehman, the "dean of the Kansas delegation" and the president of the Kansas Democratic Labor Committee, invoked Adolf Hitler to argue that Republicans are lying when they say voter ID efforts are designed to combat voter fraud.
“It’s like Hitler said, if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you,” Lehman said in an interview with The Wichita Eagle.
The comparison came just a day after top California Democrat John Burton likened Ryan's speech to the Republic National Convention to the lies of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
In response to the many inappropriate analogies, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today urged political candidates and their supporters to "stop invoking and trivializing the Holocaust."
Referring to the latest comparison, ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said, "This analogy to Eva Braun only serves to trivialize the Holocaust and is deeply offensive to Jews and other survivors, as well as those Americans who fought valiantly against the Nazis in World War II."
"I have said this repeatedly, but it bears repeating again that inappropriate Holocaust analogies simply have no place in politics,” he said. “The Holocaust and Hitler should not be part of the discussion over which party is best equipped to lead this country for the next four years.”
“Politicians and their supporters and surrogates should stop invoking Hitler and trivializing the memory of the six million and millions of others who perished in the Holocaust," Foxman added.