Press Secretary Sean Spicer went on CNN to fight for his job after favorably comparing Adolf Hitler with Bashar al-Assad at today's White House briefing.

Spicer had said unlike the Syrian strongman, the 1940s Nazi dictator 'didn't even sink to ... using chemical weapons,' leaving reporters in disbelief and causing some critics to call for his head.

'I apologize, it was a mistake to do that,' Spicer said to the network's Wolf Blitzer, whose own parents survived the Holocaust. Blitzer's paternal grandparents were killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

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Press Secretary Sean Spicer (pictured) went on CNN this afternoon to apologize for comments he made comparing Hitler, more favorably, to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad

Press Secretary Sean Spicer (right) made his apology to CNN's Wolf Blitzer (left), whose paternal grandparents perished at Auschwitz and whose parents survived the Holocaust

Horror show: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer left the briefing room in stunned silence Tuesday when he claimed Adolf Hitler never used chemical weapons

Hitler was responsible for the genocidal extermination of more than 6 million jews in gas chambers like the one at Auschwitz-Birkenau (left), using cyanide-based Zyklon B gas

Auschwitz concentration camp victims, mostly Jews, were worked and starved tens of thousands at a time, and then gassed in large groups before their bodies were incinerated

President Trump's spokesman explained that he was attempting to 'make a point about the heinous acts Assad had made against his own people last week using chemical weapons' when he made an 'inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust.'

'Which, frankly, there is no comparison,' Spicer said.

During the briefing itself, one shocked reporter tried saving Spicer from himself, reminding the top spokesman that Hitler used poison gas to exterminate millions of Jews. Another gamely scribe gave him a chance to sputter through a clarification.

Asked by Blitzer if he was aware that Jews had been gassed during Hitler's reign, Spicer said yes.

'Yes, clearly I'm aware of that,' Spicer said.

The embarrassing gaffe came as about six million American Jews – and millions more around the world – celebrate Passover.

Spicer noted the holiday in his apology as well.

'There's really is no explaining it at this point,' he said. 'It's just to say that especially this week, it was not something that was appropriate.'

Asked by Blitzer, who, exactly he was apologizing to, Spicer said, 'Well, clearly, anybody who not just suffered in the holocaust or is a descendant of anybody, but frankly anyone who was offended by those comments.'

Then, in another verbal hiccup, the spokesman said he hadn't meant to be a distraction as Trump tried to 'destabilize the region,' pointing to Syria and the Middle East.

'I should have stayed focused on the Assad regime and the dangers they have brought to their own people and the terrible atrocities that they did,' Spicer said. 'And to drag any other comparison into this was not appropriate.'

Later he properly said the the US wanted stability in the region.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas, a nerve agent created in Nazi Germany, to attack civilians last week amid an increasingly vicious civil war

Hitler primarily used Zyklon B, a powerful cyanide gas, to exterminate Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, priests, political dissidents and other enemies of the state.

Describing that historical horror, Spicer declared that Hitler 'was not using the gas on his own people.'

Within an hour the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, a group linked loosely with the famed girl diarist, demanded Spicer's removal as it claimed he 'engaged in Holocaust denial, the most offensive form of fake news imaginable.'

Assad deployed sarin gas, a chemical nerve toxin, against Syrian civilians last week in the latest atrocity to mar the Middle Eastern country's lengthy civil war.

Spicer has been eager to condemn him, and equally enthusiastic about urging Russian president Vladimir Putin to break Moscow's 60-year military alliance with Damascus.

'You look – we didn't use chemical weapons in World War II,' Spicer told reporters on Tuesday.

'You know, you had a – you know, someone as despicable as Hitler, who didn't even sink to ... using chemical weapons.'

'So you have to – if you're Russia, is this a country that you, and a regime that you want to align yourself with?' he asked in progressively more halting, choppy English.

The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, a social justice group loosely tied to the late Anne Frank, called on President Donald Trump to fire Spicer shortly after he said Adolf Hitler had never used chemical weapons

Twitter was awash with fury, rage and snark as members of Congress and a former first daughter took the opportunity to pillory Spicer

Secretary of Defense James Mattis (left) told reporters that in the Nazi World War II era, chemical weapons weren't used 'on battlefields'

Reactions in Washington were fast and furious.

'Someone get @PressSec a refresher history course on Hitler stat #Icantbelievehereallysaidthat,' wrote Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, who is Jewish.

'Never thought I would say this,' added California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, 'but Sean Spicer should go back to talking about crowd size at the inauguration.'

And Chelsea Clinton, the former first daughter, sniped at Spicer: 'I hope @PressSec takes time to visit @HolocaustMuseum. It's a few blocks away.'

But in a briefing at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary James Mattis seemed to defend the president's spokesman.

'Even in World War II, chemical weapons were not used on battlefields,' Mattis told reporters. 'Even in the Korean War, they were not used on battlefields.'

'Since World War I, there's been an international convention on this and to stand idly by while that convention is violated that is what we had to take action on that urgently in our own vital interest.'

Assad's victims included children and babies, the sight of whom was said to have driven U.S. President Donald Trump to take military action against a Syrian airbase

Hitler's victims included women, children and the infirm – too many millions for post-war investigators to count

Who's the bigger monster? Hitler (left) killed far more innocent victims than assad (right), but Spicer incorrectly gave the Nazi dictator credit for at least not gassing his own people

Moments after Spicer put his foot in his mouth, he tried to charm his way past a briefing room full of slack-jawed journalists by fielding a softball query about the annual White House Easter Egg Roll event.

'I think we're going to have an egg-celent time,' Spicer quipped, drawing audible groans.

'Oh come on!' he joked. 'You can't ask the question and not get the answer.'

But minutes later the groans turned to gasps when President Donald Trump's chief spokesman was asked to defend what he'd said about the genocidal Nazi regime.

'He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Ashad [sic] is doing,' Spicer said of Hitler, mangling Assad's name in the process.

At another point on Tuesday, the Syrian ruler's name became 'Bassad al-Ashar.'

Apparently @seanspicer thinks concentration camps were called "Holocaust centers"?? pic.twitter.com/1X8QYWTffq — Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) April 11, 2017

But as the air momentarily left the White House briefing room – and one reporter yelled that the White House was neglecting Hitler's Jewish victims – Spicer reached peak sputter.

'I mean, there was clearly – I understand, I mean – thank you – I appreciate that – there was – not in the,' he stammered.

Hitler had 'brought them into the Holocaust centers,' Spicer acknowledged. 'And I understand that.'

'But I'm saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent, into the middle of towns, it was brought – and so, the use of it, I appreciate the clarification. That was not the intent.'

Spicer issued a statement after the Tuesday briefing in which he insisted: 'In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust'

Not just Auschwitz: This Nazi gas chamber was in use at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany

After the daily press briefing concluded, the White House issued a series of three different statements from Spicer, each meant to replace the last.

'In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,' he insisted in the final draft.

'I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.'

Sarin was itself a product of Nazi Germany, invented as an experimental pesticide in 1939. Hitler's Reich quickly moved it into military mass-production, although it never deployed it against his Western enemies.

There were reports in 1942, however, that Nazi armies used chemical weapons against Soviet forces during a siege in the Crimea, gassing thousands huddled in subterranean caves carved out of a quarry near the town of Adzhimushkay.

Online reactions to Spicer's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad briefing ranged from shocking to mocking.

New York Times columnist Max Fisher tried to put himself in the Trump spokesman's head.

'Spicer’s internal monologue: "Hmm, I need to argue that Assad is bad. Guess it’s time to downplay Hitler for some reason",' Fisher tweeted.

'My relatives didn't die in Holocaust Centers,' a social media manager at Random House Books wrote on twitter. '[T]hey died in Concentration Camps.'