German office calls out KMT chair for 'troubling' Nazi comments

Taipei, May 8 (CNA) The German Institute Taipei issued a strongly worded statement on Wednesday night condemning the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) for comparing Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government with the Nazi regime.

In a statement published on social media, the German representative office to Taiwan expressed "deep disappointment and concern" over Chu's comments during a meeting of the KMT's standing committee in Taipei earlier the same day.

"What Lai Ching-te (賴清德) has been doing to the opposition is exactly what [Adolf] Hitler did" during his reign of dictatorship in Nazi Germany, Chu said, against the backdrop of prosecutors' ongoing investigation into KMT's alleged forgery of signatures used in recall petitions against DPP lawmakers.

Multiple KMT local chapters, including those in Taipei and New Taipei, have been raided by prosecutors over the past couple of weeks, with the party's Taipei chapter head Huang Lu Chin ju (黃呂錦茹) currently placed under detention for alleged forgery and illegal use of personal data.

The DPP government has exploited the judiciary to target the KMT, Chu said, arguing that Hitler also manipulated legal procedures to dismantle democratic institutions and purge political rivals in Germany.

In its statement, the German office called on "the KMT leadership to refrain from invoking inappropriate and historically insensitive comparisons in domestic political discourse," describing such behavior as "distorting the memory of the past for political ends."

"Any attempt to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime or to draw parallels between the atrocities committed in Germany and Europe between 1933 and 1945 and the current political situation in Taiwan is profoundly troubling," the office added.

The post by the German Institute Taipei, which represents Berlin's interests in Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic ties, has since been shared by the European Union and French offices.

Meanwhile, the Israel Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei lodged a similar protest on Thursday, noting it was "disappointed and concerned to learn about the inappropriate comparison between the atrocities of the Nazi regime and the current political context in Taiwan."

"We reject all forms of trivialization of the Holocaust; such comparisons are deeply offensive to the memory of six million Jewish people who suffered and perished," the Israeli office said in a social media post.

On Thursday morning, Chu pushed back against criticism from the foreign representative offices, telling reporters at an event in Taipei that "foreign governments should not become accomplices in the oppression of democracy" or interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.

The KMT chairman once again compared the Lai administration with the "Fascists" and accused it of becoming a dictatorship through persecuting the opposition.