Officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum have criticized a Louisiana congressman for narrating part of a five-minute video from inside a former gas chamber at the Nazi concentration camp in Poland.
Louisiana news outlets report that US Rep. Clay Higgins posted the video Saturday.
In it, the Republican says the killings took just 20 minutes and show why the US military ‘must be invincible’.
A post on the Auschwitz Memorial’s official Twitter account said Tuesday that a former gas chamber is not a stage but a place where there should be respectful silence.
Later Tuesday, it posted a photo of the entrance sign to that building, asking visitors to ‘maintain silence here.’
‘You are in a building where the SS murdered thousands of people,’ a stone engraving reads.
‘Please maintain silence here: remember their suffering and show respect for their memory.’
Higgins’ offices were closed Tuesday for the July Fourth holiday and he could not immediately be reached for comment.
‘A great sense of dread comes over you in this place,’ Higgins says in the clip.
‘Man’s inhumanity to man can be quite shocking.’
The congressman then draws a parallel between the Nazis and threats currently faced by the US.
‘The world’s a smaller place now than it was in World War II,’ the congressman says in another scene in the video.
‘The United States is more accessible to terror like this, horror like this.
‘It’s hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment – unwavering commitment – to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.’
On social media, reaction to Higgins was negative, with Twitter users expressing outrage over the video.
One Twitter user even ‘apologized for this American.’
This is the second time in the last month that Higgins has caused a stir on social media.
After the June 3rd terrorist attack on London Bridge, Higgins came under fire for a Facebook post in which he called for all radical Muslims to be hunted down and killed.
Higgins – dubbed the ‘Cajun John Wayne’ – wrote the post the day after the attack on London Bridge and Borough Market that left seven dead.
‘The free world… all of Christendom… is at war with Islamic horror,’ Higgins wrote in the post, above a picture of a victim on the ground outside of a pub.