A donation by former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci will be used boost Nazi hunting efforts, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has announced.
Mr Scaramucci announced he would donate $25,000 (£18,900) to the centre as an apology for a tweet in which his news outlet, the Scaramucci Post, invited followers to take a guess at how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
The funds were received on Tuesday and will be used for the work of Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel who has made a name for himself tracking down former Nazis.
Mr Zuroff is in the process of pressuring German authorities to indict surviving members of the infamous Einsatsgruppen, a unit that mass-murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.
He told Newsweek: “From what I understand, the intentions were not bad, [but] this is not the way to do it. To encourage deniers, distorters and all that.”
21 per cent of around 5,000 respondents to the Scaramucci Post poll selected the option “less than a million” after it was posted last week.
Within an hour the post was taken town and a pair of remorseful tweets from Mr Scaramucci’s business associate, Lance Leifer, was posted accepting responsibility for the error.
The first said: “The intent of the poll was to highlight ignorance of the basic facts of the Holocaust. I take full responsibility for it.”
Mr Scaramucci himself said he was in London when the tweet was posted and that he did not know it was going out.
He later promised to make the $25,000 donation, which the Simon Wiesenthal Centre confirmed this week it had received.
“Even at this late date, a single indictment, a single trial can educate 21st Century youth about the depths of the Nazi barbarity during the Shoah’,” officials from the centre said in press statement.
The outspoken Mr Scaramucci resigned as Donald Trump’s communications director just ten days after his appointment, following a turbulent spell in which he publicly fought with other White House staff.
