The Alabama Holocaust Commission has condemned a north Alabama congressman’s quotations from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to call allegations that President Donald Trump colluded with Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election a "big lie."

In a statement Wednesday, the commission criticized U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks' use of the phrase, first employed by Hitler to blame Jewish people for the defeat of Germany in World War I. The Huntsville Republican quoted a section of Mein Kampf in a March 25 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives criticizing the collusion allegations.



“Socialist Democrats and their fake news media allies were shameless in their ‘Big Lie’ scam that has inspired hatred against President Trump and violence against Americans who support America’s foundational principles,” Brooks said in the speech. He added that he believed U.S. Attorney General William Barr's summary of an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller provided "vindication" for Trump. The summary found no evidence of collusion but did not exonerate Trump.

The commission statement Wednesday said the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazi regime “deserve unique remembrance, and the words of those who conducted and orchestrated this genocide in Hitler’s name do not deserve to be recognized, much less reiterated in the halls of Congress.” (Al Benn, a former Montgomery Advertiser reporter, is a member of the commission.)



“Such facile comparisons, used in order to demean opponents and gain political capital, should be actively avoided,” the statement continued. “Using such rhetoric not only trivializes our past, as well as the victims of this genocide, but also cheapens our current discourse and maintains a divisive rhetoric all too common at the present time.”



Brooks has also inaccurately called the Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers Party, “Germany's Socialist Party” while calling members of the Democratic Party in the United States “Socialist Democrats.”



In an interview Thursday, Brooks stood by his characterization of history and questioned the political leanings of members of the Alabama Holocaust Commission.



“The Socialist Party of Germany is the most infamous and horrific example of the use of the Big Lie propaganda tactic,” the congressman said. “As such, it should be cited regularly so that people will be reminded of how horrific the consequences can be if we let political figures and the media get by with using the Big Lie propaganda tactic.”



Despite the name, the Nazis were a fascist organization that suppressed socialist parties in Germany, including the Social Democratic Party. According to William L. Shirer, a journalist who covered Nazi Germany and later wrote “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” Hitler, whose guiding principles were racism and anti-Semitism, was “bored” by economics and later defined a socialist as “whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation.”



Shirer also wrote that Hitler resolutely avoided enforcing any socialist planks in the Nazi platform once he came to power.

“They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them,” he wrote.



Hitler wrote that "the state is a racial organism and not an economic organization" and biographer Ian Kershaw writes that, for Hitler, the economy — whether free market or socialistic — was subservient to the state and Hitler's program of war and industrialized murder.



"Since struggle among nations would be decisive for future survival, Germany’s economy had to be subordinated to the preparation, then carrying out, of this struggle," Kershaw wrote. "This meant that liberal ideas of economic competition had to be replaced by the subjection of the economy to the dictates of the national interest. Similarly, any 'socialist' ideas in the Nazi program had to follow the same dictates."



In an interview Thursday, Dan Puckett, chairman of the Alabama Holocaust Commission and a professor of history at Troy University who specializes in the Holocaust, said the statement was meant as a criticism of the rhetoric, not Brooks himself.



“It’s not really a legitimate comparison,” he said. “What you’re doing is going to the extremes. I’ve written a number of Op-Eds on this. There’s only one Hitler. That’s Hitler.”



Asked about Shirer’s comments that Hitler left the more socialist elements of the Nazi platforms unenforced, Brooks said “I don’t care what the revisionist historians may say with their left-wing agenda.” Shirer was a witness to the rise of Nazi Germany.



Brooks, who voted to make the Mueller Report public, said in the Thursday phone interview that “I am comfortable with William Barr that when he says he is quoting from the Mueller Report that he accurately quoted from the Mueller Report.”



In a statement released by his office on Wednesday evening, Brooks said the “Commission’s bizarre and history-ignoring letter prompts one to wonder how many of the Commission’s members joined America’s Socialist Democrats in undermining the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election by also spreading the ‘Big Lie,’ without credible evidence, that President Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential race.”



Puckett said Thursday he was "puzzled" by that response and said the Alabama Holocaust Commission's mission was to provide education about the Holocaust and other genocides. He said politicians on any side need to avoid rhetoric like that “makes the victims, the Holocaust survivors trivia to be dismissed to score political points.”



“It’s better if we avoid those sorts of comparisons, and avoid that rhetoric together,” he said. “The fact is we’re losing our civility. This does not help.”