German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images German president condemns Nazi history ‘bird shit’ comment ‘Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history,’ AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland told a youth conference.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier hit back Sunday at comments from the co-leader of the far-right AfD party, who said that the period of Nazi rule was "just bird shit" in a millennium of successful history.

While Steinmeier did not explicitly name Alexander Gauland, he said that those who "today deny, trivialise or relativise" the crimes of the Nazi period "want to deliberately reopen old wounds, and foment hatred," according to an official read-out of his speech.

In an apparent plea for Germans not to focus too much on the period when Adolf Hitler was in power, Gauland told an AfD party youth conference Saturday that "Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history," according to a report by Spiegel.

While referring to the Nazi era Gauland said Germans accepted "responsbility for those 12 years," he added that "we have a glorious history — and that, dear friends, lasted longer than those damn 12 years."

The period of Nazi rule brought about the biggest genocide in history — the shoah, or holocaust — and World War II.

"Those who today deny, trivialize or relativize this extraordinary rupture with civilization, are not only mocking the millions of victims, but want to deliberately reopen old wounds and foment hatred. And we need to oppose this together," Steinmeier told a crowd at a ceremony for the tenth anniversary of a monument to the Nazi persecution of gays and lesbians.

In his speech, Steinmeier also asked for "forgiveness" for the persecution and incarceration of gays that continued in Germany for years after the end of Nazi rule "and for the long silence that ensued."

Steinmeier's rebuke came a day after Gauland addressed the youth conference. AfD leaders have repeatedly used addresses to their party's youth wing as an opportunity to ramp up their nationalist rhetoric and publicly oppose Germany's remembrance of the Holocaust.

Last year regional leader Björn Höcke called for a "180-degree reversal" to that remembrance and said that Germany's monument to murdered jews was "the monument of shame."

AfD, or Alternative for Germany, is the country's largest opposition party. A poll by Emnid on Saturday found 15 percent of voters would vote for the party if the country held elections this Sunday, only 3 percent behind the center-left SPD.