(Reuters) – Robert F. Kennedy Jr on Tuesday apologized for remarks he made over the weekend in which he invoked the Holocaust while speaking at an anti-vaxxer rally.
At the rally on Sunday in Washington opposing vaccination mandates against COVID-19, the lawyer and son of the slain U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy said, “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
On Tuesday, he tweeted, “I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”
The teenage Frank hid from the Nazis in an attic for two years in Amsterdam, not in Germany. Her story was detailed in a diary published after her death in 1945 at a German concentration camp, one of six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
(Writing by Mark Porter; Editing by Howard Goller)
