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A Republican legislator in Maine who lost his wife to COVID-19 last week appeared at a rally on Tuesday that featured a GOP colleague who compared the state’s Democratic governor to a Nazi doctor who performed deadly experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.

State Rep. Chris Johansen, who emerged in the early days of the pandemic as a fierce opponent of public health-related restrictions, joined a group of lawmakers at the event in Augusta. State Rep. Heidi Sampson delivered a speech to the crowd that baselessly accused Gov. Janet Mills, who has introduced a vaccine mandate for health-care workers, of operating a government campaign to test “experimental” vaccines on unknowing citizens.

She described Mills as the “reincarnated” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly experiments on Jewish people in Auschwitz death camps during the Holocaust.

“Do I need to remind you of the late 1930s and into the 40s in Germany. And the experiments with Josef Mengele,” Sampson said according to a video from the event posted online. “What was it? A shot. And these were crimes against humanity. And what came out of that? The Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Trial. Informed consent is at the top and violating that is punishable by death.”

She also compared vaccine mandates to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on Black men. Sampson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The rally came in response to a recent announcement that health-care workers would be required to get shots as part of a push to shore up vaccinations among state and federal employees and health-care workers with public-facing roles.

State Rep. Shelley Rudnicki, who recorded the rally on Facebook Live, told The Daily Beast on Friday that the event had been misunderstood and wasn’t so much anti-vaccines as it was a “pro-freedom” rally.

“The vaccine was just a culmination of everything,” Rudnicki contested. “It was a ‘right to choose’ rally.”

When asked about a trend of comparisons being made between vaccine cards and Jews being forced to carry the Star of David during the Holocaust, she said: “I think what a lot of people are saying is, asking for people’s papers, and that’s what it comes down to.”

According to the Bangor Daily News, neither Chris Johansen nor his wife Cindy, who served as corresponding secretary for the Aroostook County Republicans, had been vaccinated against COVID when she first began describing her symptoms on Facebook last month.

While there is little evidence of her death on the Facebook page of Aroostook County Republicans, the Aroostook County Democrats posted a condolence message on Facebook on Aug. 15. Her death was later confirmed to The Daily Beast by a spokesperson for the Maine Republican Party.

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