Didn’t they teach history at Portsmouth Abbey?

White House press secretary Sean Spicer was widely criticized Tuesday for comments about Syrian dictator Bashar Assad that were seen as downplaying Adolf Hitler’s crimes during World War II.

Spicer quickly walked back the comments, saying he did not intend to “lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust” when he suggested during a daily briefing that Assad’s chemical weapons attack on civilians in rebel territory last week made him worse at least in one respect than Hitler, who Spicer said “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

“We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” Spicer told reporters, as he criticized the Russian government for its support of Assad. “Someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons. You have to, if you’re Russia, ask yourself, is this a country that you, and a regime that you want to align yourself with?”

In fact, Hitler’s Nazi Germany did use chemical weapons, most notably through the Holocaust, the genocidal program intended to murder Europe’s entire Jewish population. Many of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed in gas chambers using Zyklon B and other poisons.

Sarin gas, the weapon believed to have been used by Assad’s regime, was first created and weaponized by Nazi scientists in 1938.

What an idiot.