Brazil's Culture Secretary Roberto Alvim has been sacked by President Jair Bolsonaro after posting a video in which he appeared to copy a speech by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

The video, released to announce national prizes aimed at to revitalising the arts in Brazil, quickly went viral, attracting outrage due to its at times word-for-word similarity to a speech Goebbels made in 1933.

In the video, Mr Alvim, a theatre director appointed last year by Mr Bolsonaro, announced the prize as music played in the background from a Wagner opera, Adolf Hitler's favourite music.

"Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and it will be national … and imperative because it will be rooted in the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing," Mr Alvim said in the video.

Goebbels, Hitler's notorious ideologue, told theatre directors during the Nazi regime that: "German art of the next decade will be heroic, will be wildly romantic, will be objective and free of sentimentality, will be national with great pathos and equally imperative and binding, or else it will be nothing."

The term "Goebbels" became one of the top trending topics on Brazilian Twitter, after Mr Alvim added he wanted 2020 to mark a historic cultural rebirth to "create a new and thriving Brazilian civilisation".

Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has long railed against "cultural Marxism". ( AP: Eraldo Peres )

Mr Alvim later apologised on Facebook for what he said was an "unintentional error", admitting however that he chose the music himself, because the composer's work is transcendent and stemmed from his Christian faith.

"If I had known of the origin of the phrase I would never have used it," he said, claiming the speech had been written based on ideas provided by his aides.

Davi Alcolumbre, the first Jewish president of Brazil's Senate, said the video was "shockingly Nazism-inspired".

Brazil's far-right President Bolsonaro, who often celebrates torturers and killers of Brazil's 1964-85 military dictatorship, denounced Nazism and authoritarian regimes in a Twitter post.

"I reiterate our rejection of totalitarian and genocidal ideologies," Mr Bolsonaro said.

He has long railed against what he calls "cultural Marxism", which some of his ministers say is undermining society's morals.

The leftist Workers' Party governed Brazil for 13 years until President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016.

ABC/wires