Christian conservative group American Family Association's (AFA) Bryan Fischer has likened lifting the policy that bans gay troops from serving openly to Hitler's army of “savage gay Nazis.”

Fischer's comments come as both houses of Congress prepare to take key votes on repealing the policy known as “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.”

Fischer told his radio audience Wednesday that Hitler was gay and specifically recruited gay soldiers to carry out his most vicious attacks because straight men were not brutal enough.

“Homosexual soldiers basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after,” he said. “So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.”

Fischer's commentary has been pulled straight from the pages of controversial anti-gay author Scott Lively's The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.

In the book, Lively asserts that gays, particularly men, played a key role in elevating the Nazi Party in Germany. He also links the modern gay rights move to events that took place in Nazi Germany in an effort to solidify his claim that gay rights are “dangerous.”

“[T]he 'gay' movement I have seen and investigated is neither benign, nor are its members 'victims'. It is vicious, deceptive and enormously powerful. Its philosophy is Machiavellian and its tactics are (literally) Hitlerian,” Lively wrote.

Lively, the founder of Abiding Truth Ministries, a group listed as a hate group by The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks such groups, also recently came under fire for supporting an anti-gay bill that included a death penalty in Uganda.

Writing at TPM.com, Zachary Roth disputes the claim that Hitler was gay: “There's little hard evidence that Hitler himself was gay. … The iota of truth behind Fischer's view is that several leaders of the SA – the tightly organized band of street brawlers that helped Hitler rise to power – were gay. That included Ernst Rohm, the unit's founder and leader.”

Roth goes on to explain that Hitler had Rohm executed in 1934 and the SA's power plummeted soon after.