US lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene apologises for comparing masks to Holocaust

Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photo / AP

US Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised today for recently comparing the required wearing of safety masks in the US House of Representatives to the horrors of the Holocaust.

"I'm truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust," Greene told reporters outside the Capitol, saying she had visited Washington's US Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier in the day. "There's no comparison and there never ever will be."

Greene's comments were a rare expression of regret by the conservative agitator whose career has included the embrace of violent and offensive conspiracy theories and angry confrontations with progressive colleagues.

Her apology came more than three weeks after appearing on a conservative podcast and comparing Covid-19 safety requirements adopted by Democrats controlling the House to "a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star".

Greene said people were "put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. This is exactly the type of abuse that [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi is talking about."

Greene's comments were condemned by Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who called the comparison "appalling".

Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.

Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.https://t.co/6X6VNolcA7

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 25, 2021

GOP leaders have often been reluctant to castigate Greene, a close ally of former President Donald Trump.

After social media posts were unearthed in which Greene suggested support for executing some Democratic leaders, McCarthy and most Republicans stood by her when the House took the unusual step of stripping her of her committee assignments in February.

But as House members returned to the Capitol today after a three-week break, Greene was contrite.

"Anti-Semitism is true hate," she said. "And I saw that today at the Holocaust Museum."

In 2018, two years before her election to Congress, she speculated on Facebook that California wildfires may have been caused by "lasers or blue beams of light" controlled by a left-wing cabal tied to a powerful Jewish family.

Marjorie Taylor Greene at the US Capitol Building. Photo / AP

Today she told reporters that when she was 19, she visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in what during World War II was Nazi-occupied Poland.

"It isn't like I learned about it today," she said of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and huge numbers of other people were killed.

"I went today because I thought it was important," she said, and wanted to talk about it as she apologised.

Democrat Brad Schneider said he would introduce a resolution in the House this week to censure Greene.