A Romanian minister has shockingly compared the incineration of dead pigs infected with swine fever to the slaughter of Jews at Auschwitz, according to reports.

Agriculture Minister Petre Daea made his crass comment during a TV interview as he discussed measures to stem the spread of the disease at a breeding farm in southern Romania where more than 44,500 pigs were killed.

“There is no antidote, there is no vaccine, no medicine, the only way is to sacrifice them. The pigs are incinerated, it’s a terrible job. It’s like Auschwitz in there,” he said Tuesday, referring to the highly contagious disease that causes fatal hemorrhages in pigs, according to Balkan Insight.

The Israeli embassy in the Romanian capital of Bucharest expressed the Jewish state’s revulsion at Daea’s words.

“We hope … that such an association was made by Minister Daea because of the lack of in-depth information on what the Holocaust and Auschwitz are, without the intention of dishonoring the memory of millions of victims,” the embassy said in a statement.

Daea apologized Thursday.

“I respect all the members of the Jewish community and clarify that I only wished to describe the difficult situation facing Romanian breeders due to the African swine fever,” the social Democrat said in a statement.

“I’ve never offended anyone in my life, I love my fellow men, I just expressed the pain in my soul and I hope everybody understands that!” added the tone-deaf minister, who faced calls for his resignation by opposition lawmakers and Jewish groups.

Former Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos said it was “unacceptable to compare the incineration of pigs to a world tragedy,” the Times of Israel reported.

The National Council for Combating Discrimination said it would launch an investigation.

“These declarations are susceptible to violate human dignity and create a hostile climate, humiliating all those who remember the Holocaust,” the group’s president Csaba Asztalos told AFP.

Maximilian Katz, director of the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania, invited Daea to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland to “understand the enormity and the seriousness of his scandalous statement.

“It is not the first time this type of comparison is made in Romania, but it is the first time an acting minister has made this type of unspeakable statement,” Katz said in a press release Thursday.

The issue is particularly sensitive because of the huge number of Jews killed in Nazi-allied Romania during World War II, when Jews from across Europe were sent to death camps built and operated by the Germans, including Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.

More than a million Jews were killed at the notorious death camp from 1940 to 1945.

Romania remained an ally of Nazi Germany until August 1944, when it changed sides.

Between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed by civilian and military authorities in Romania and areas they controlled during the war, according to a 2004 report by a commission headed by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.