ABC suspends Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for comment on the Holocaust

Actress Whoopi Goldberg (New York, 66 years old) has been suspended for two weeks from the program she hosts in the United States after saying that the Nazi genocide of six million Jews was not "a matter of race."

host

apologized, ABC News president Kim Godwin said she had decided it wasn't enough.

"Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments," Godwin said in a statement posted on the channel's public relations Twitter account.

"Although Whoopi apologized, I asked her to take some time to reflect and realize the impact of her comments," he said.

The Oscar-winning American actress told

that the Holocaust involved "two groups of white people."

“In today's program I said that the Holocaust 'is not a question of race, but of man's inhumanity to man.'

I should have said it's about both," Goldberg wrote on Twitter late Monday.

“The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never change.

I'm sorry for the damage I've caused," added the actress.

After Goldberg's comments, some specialists responded that race was decisive for the genocide, since the Nazis believed they were a superior race.

“No, Whoopi Goldberg, the Holocaust was about the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazis, whom they considered to be an inferior race,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League.

“They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify the murder of six million Jews.

Holocaust distortion is dangerous,” he added.

For its part, the United States Holocaust Museum wrote on Twitter that "racism was central to Nazi ideology."

“Jews were not defined by religion, but by race.

Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder,” the institution stated without referring to Goldberg's comments.

The actress, who has starred in films that have exposed anti-black racism such as

, spoke on the show during a discussion about a Tennessee school's ban on the 1986 graphic novel

about life in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, is considered a powerful and accurate depiction of the Nazi murder of millions of Jews during World War II.