Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.

The lawmakers said that Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."

Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the prison on a U.S. naval base in Cuba, the lawmakers said. Mariko Peters, a member of the Dutch Green Party, who began the exchange with Lantos, said she took notes during the exchange.