“One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” Donald Trump tweeted. | Getty ADL: Trump's Nazi comments trivialize the Holocaust

The Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday called on President-elect Donald Trump to either apologize for or explain why he compared the present-day intelligence agencies in the U.S. to “Nazi Germany.”

“ADL always has maintained that glib comparisons to Nazi Germany are offensive and a trivialization of the Holocaust,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “We have a long record of speaking out when both Democrats and Republicans engage in such overheated rhetoric. It would be helpful for the President-Elect to explain his intentions or apologize for the remark.”


Incensed over reports alleging that the president-elect was presented with a two-page synopsis Friday of claims that Russia had compromising information about him, Trump blasted the stories from his Twitter account as “fake news” and questioned whether he was “living in Nazi Germany.”

“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public,” he tweeted Wednesday morning, one of four posts lashing out over the allegations. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

He doubled down when asked about his tweet at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “I think it was disgraceful — disgraceful — that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out,” he told reporters. “I think it’s a disgrace, and I say that — and I say that — and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do. I think it’s a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public.”

Greenblatt said Trump’s “use of Nazi Germany to make a political analogy is not only an

inappropriate comparison on the merits, but it also coarsens our discourse and diminishes the horror of the Holocaust.”

“There are legitimate questions on all sides regarding foreign influence in the 2016 presidential race,” he continued in the statement. “But the United States has democratic elections, a free press, rule of law and a civil service — including our intelligence agencies — that is deeply loyal to the U.S. Constitution. These facts invalidate any analogies between America and totalitarian societies.”