Romania's minister of agriculture, Petre Daea, said on Thursday that he did not mean to offend anyone when he compared the incineration of dead pigs to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Speaking about the issue of African swine fever in pigs on Tuesday, in a televised interview, Daea said that in breeding grounds affected by the disease, "pigs are incinerated, it's extraordinary work, it's like Auschwitz."
African swine fever is a highly contagious disease that causes fatal hemorrhages in pigs. It is transmitted through contact with infected pigs and ticks, and by ingesting infected kitchen waste. Some 400 outbreaks of the disease have been reported in Romania's Danube Delta and near the Hungarian border.
"I respect all the members of the Jewish community and clarify that I only wished to describe the difficult situation facing Romanian breeders due to the African swine fever," Minister Daea said in a statement.
"I have never offended anyone. I just expressed my pain," he added.
Read more: Rappers Kollegah, Farid Bang in Auschwitz for 'journey into the unknown'
Calls for Daea to resign
Former Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos, who has also served as agriculture minister, publicly condemned Daea's comment, saying it was "unacceptable to compare the incineration of pigs to a world tragedy."
The social democratic minister faced calls to resign from two opposition parties, the Liberal Party and the Save Romania Union. His party's chairman, Liviu Dragnea, issued an official apology to the Jewish community and said the Holocaust was "a tragedy that should never be repeated."
Dragnea also explained that Daea had not meant to be offensive, but urged him to avoid expressions "which can deeply offend."
Read more: Auschwitz: Evolution of a death camp and Holocaust memorial
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel" to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared "undesirables" by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: "gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears."
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
'Stolpersteine' - stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany's Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in 18 countries in Europe - it's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau" where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the "Brown House" in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon
Israel: Holocaust cannot be 'trivialized'
The Israeli Embassy in Romania expressed its "dismay and consternation at the affirmations of the Minister of Agriculture."
"We hope, though, that such an association was made by Minister Daea due to the lack of detailed information on what was the Holocaust and Auschwitz, without the intention of dishonoring the memory of millions of victims," the embassy statement read.
The death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust "should never be forgotten, trivialized or minimalized," the Israeli Embassy added.
Over 1 million Jews were killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from 1940 to 1945. Located in present-day Poland, Auschwitz is today a symbol of the genocide of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany.
jcg/rt (AP, AFP, Reuters)
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