Republican Congressman Thomas Massie was condemned for a “shameful” tweet comparing COVID-19 public health measures with the Nazi Holocaust. Photo: Screenshot.

A Kentucky Congressman who tweeted a shocking comparison between public health measures to curb the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass incarceration of Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II has encountered fierce condemnation, along with the resignation of one of his staffers.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from northern Kentucky, tweeted a graphic on Wednesday that showed a hand with a number tattooed on the wrist — a reference to the Nazi practice of tattooing serial numbers on inmates who were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland  for use as slave labor.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than 400,000 serial numbers were issued by the occupying German authorities at Auschwitz to Jews, Poles, Soviet civilians and other inmates condemned to forced labor in brutal conditions.

Alongside the image shared by Massie was a text that stated: “If you have to carry a card on you to gain access to a restaurant, venue or event in your own country, that’s no longer a free country.”

Massie’s tweet, which has since been deleted without further comment, was described as “shameful” by one Lexington, Kentucky rabbi.

Massie had shown “tremendous ignorance of public policy, history, and a horrible lack of judgment,” in posting the tweet, Rabbi Shlomo Litvin told local broadcaster WKYT.

Arguing that the kind of “ignorance” shown by the congressman spotlighted the need for “moral education,” Litvin noted that Massie’s office had “refused to speak to Jewish leaders repeatedly in the past.”

He went on: “We continue to hope for more representation and communication in the future. Our community deserves it. These positions do not in any way represent the views of most Kentuckians. The Commonwealth of Kentucky has led the effort to combat antisemitism and organizations like Kentucky Educators for Holocaust Studies lead the way in combatting such ignorance and offense.”

Massie’s tweet also resulted in the immediate resignation of one of his staffers, who accused the congressman of “belittling the Holocaust.”

“I quit,” former Massie intern Andrew Zirkle wrote on Twitter. “I wanted to let everyone who knows me personally to know that as soon as I got in to work this morning, I resigned my position in the Office of Congressman Thomas Massie because of his tweet comparing the horrors of the Holocaust to vaccine passports.”

“Belittling the Holocaust in this way is an affront to the Jewish community as well as any survivors or family of those who perished,” Zirkle continued. “Everyone has personal limits of what is intolerable and this is one of mine.”

Massie is not the only Republican politician to have made the comparison between measures to curb the pandemic and the Nazi extermination program. In May, far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared on Twitter that “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s (sic) forced Jewish people to wear a gold (sic) star.”

And in June, a far right Washington State lawmaker, Rep. Jim Walsh, was filmed wearing a home-made version of the “Judenstern.” Under Nazi rule in Germany and occupied Europe, Jews over the age of 6 were forced to wear the “Judenstern” (“Jews’ Star”) — a yellow Star of David marked with the word “Jew” — on their outer clothing in order to underline their “subhuman” status under Nazi racial laws.

Walsh said at the time that he wore the symbol as an “echo from history.”

“In the current context, we are all Jews,” Walsh opined.