Paul Spiegel, Germany’s top Jewish leader and president of the Central Council of Jews, demanded that Catholic leader Cardinal Joachim Meisner take back the words of his sermon comparing abortion to the Holocaust. In addition to comparing abortion to the mass murders perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin and Herod, Meisner said that abortion puts “‘all previous crimes of humanity in the shadows.'” In response to the criticism from Spiegel as well as Green party politicians, Meisner defended his sermon as a comparison to the euthanasia killings of the Holocaust and Soviet purges, not the genocide.