HUNGARIAN CULTURE CHIEF HIT FOR COMPARING GEORGE SOROS TO HITLER

A Hungarian cultural commissioner has retracted an op-ed in which he said George Soros was "the liberal Fuhrer." The article was lambasted by Jewish and Holocaust memorial groups in the country, Deutsche Welle reported.

An opinion article on Saturday from Szilard Demeter, a ministerial commissioner head of the Petofi Literary Museum in Budapest, in the pro-government Origo media outlet drew outrage from Hungary's Jewish community for calling Soros "the liberal Fuhrer." Demeter, 44, said in a statement Sunday that he would retract his article "independently of what I think."

"I will grant that those criticizing me are correct in saying that to call someone a Nazi is to relativize, and that making parallels with Nazis can inadvertently cause harm to the memory of the victims," he said in a statement.

Soros, a Hungarian born billionaire and Holocaust survivor, is a frequent target of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government for his philanthropic activities that favor liberal causes. In his opinion article, Demeter said Europe has become "the gas chamber of George Soros," a blunt reference to gas chambers used by the Nazis to undertake mass killings of Jews. "Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life," Demeter wrote. Demeter compared Soros to Hitler, writing he was "the Liberal Fuhrer, and his liber-Aryan army deifies him more than did Hitler's own."