MPs from Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party staged a walk out from the Bavarian parliament during a service to remember Holocaust victims, after it was accused of playing down the crimes of Nazis.

After Charlotte Knobloch – the former head of Germany‘s Central Council of Jews – told the chamber that the AfD based its policies on “hate and marginalisation”, more than a dozen state politicians made a point of walking out.

She said the party had “downplayed the crimes of the Nazis and has close connections to the extreme right”.

MPs from rival parties gave her speech a standing ovation as their AfD colleagues walked out of the parliament.

Katrin Ebner-Steiner, head of the AfD’s parliamentary party in Bavaria, said it was an “appropriate response”, before accusing Ms Knobloch of abusing “a memorial service for the victims of the Nazis in order to defame the complete AfD and its democratically elected representatives with the worst blanket insinuations”.

Others, including Katharina Schulze, a Greens leader in Bavaria, praised the “clear and truthful words” of her tribute.

Markus Söder, minister-president of Bavaria, also criticised the “disrespectful” actions of the AfD’s members.

Ms Knobloch, who was speaking ahead of Sunday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, survived Second World War by hiding in the Bavarian countryside.

AfD members have a long history of inflammatory comments regarding the actions of the Nazis.

Charlotte Knobloch, Holocaust survivor and former head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, speaks at the Bavarian Parliament in Munich (AP)

In 2018, the party’s co-leader dismissed the period as a “speck of bird poo in more than 1,000 years of successful German history”.

AfD co-founder, Alexander Gauland, also said in 2017 that Germany had “the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars”.

He added: “People no longer need to reproach us with these 12 years. They don’t relate to our identity nowadays.”

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

The AfD came third in the country’s 2017 national election after campaigning strongly against immigration.