Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) confronted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in a Wednesday hearing about her false claims that Nazism was rampant in Ukraine — an argument frequently touted by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify his country’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a House Oversight Committee hearing titled “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare,” Moskowitz issued a searing rebuke of the Georgia congresswoman’s efforts to paint Ukrainians as Nazis and pushed back against her comparisons of Ukraine’s government to that of Nazi Germany.
“Stop bringing up Nazis and Hitler. The only people who know about Nazis and Hitler are the 10 million people and their families who lost their loved ones — generations of people who were wiped out,” Moskowitz said.
“It is enough of this disgusting behavior, using Nazis as propaganda,” he continued. “You want to talk about Nazis? Get yourself over to the Holocaust Museum. You go see what Nazis did.”
“It’s despicable that we use that, and we allow it, and we sit here like somehow it’s regular,” he said.
Moskowitz began by invoking his own family’s history, saying, “Now, I want to address something else that went on in this committee by another member,” referring to Greene’s comments earlier the same day.
“And I say this as someone whose grandparents escaped the Holocaust. My grandmother was part of the Kindertransport out of Germany. Her parents were killed in Auschwitz. My grandfather, her husband, escaped Poland from the pogroms.”
Moskowitz described Nazi Germany’s efforts to wipe out the Jewish people, and criticized fellow lawmakers for tolerating false claims, saying, “We pretend that behavior is acceptable and regular.”
“There are no concentration camps in Ukraine. They’re not taking babies and shooting them in the ear because they’re Jewish. There’s no gas chambers. There’s no ovens. They’re not railing people in, they’re not ripping gold out of people’s mouths. They’re not taking stuff out of their homes. They’re not trying to erase a people, the Ukrainians,” Moskowitz said.
His remarks follow Greene’s line of questioning in the hearing, which she used to push back on Democrats’ witness, historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on the Holocaust, fascism, the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe.
In her remarks, Greene highlighted several news stories and displayed several photos that she said depicted neo-Nazis in Ukraine. She raised concerns that it is now widely considered misinformation to talk about “the Nazis in Ukraine and their recruitment efforts that go all around the world.”
Greene displayed a news story, entitled, “Inside a White Supremacist Militia in Ukraine,” and then held up a photo of what appeared to be two Ukrainian soldiers, smiling, and holding their right hands up as a form of salute.
“This looks like something you’d see out of Hitler’s Germany from Ukraine. And this is something that’s extremely important to talk about,” Greene said.
When given a chance to respond to Greene’s remarks, Snyder refuted the suggestion that Nazis were pervasive in Ukrainian government, and he urged lawmakers to redirect their concerns about fascism to focus on Russia.
“If the chamber is interested in the degree of far-right participation in Ukrainian politics, you can be assured that no far-right party has ever crossed 3 percent … in a Ukrainian election,” he said. “So, of course, there are bad people in every country, but by any comparative standard, it is a very small phenomenon.”
“In Russia, on the other hand, the army includes openly Nazi formations … the government itself is fascist in character, and it is carrying out a war, which includes deportation of children by the tens of thousands, the open intention of destroying a state, as well as mass torture,” Snyder said. “So if we’re looking for fascism, and if there is anyone who is sincerely concerned about halting fascism or racism, you would wish to halt Russia.”
