Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld has come under fire for using the Holocaust to attack German chancellor Angela Merkel for opening the country’s borders to refugees.

The fashion designer, 80, told a French television show: “One cannot – even if there are decades between them – kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place.

“I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian and after four days said ‘The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust’.”

By Monday the comments made by Mr Lagerfeld had attracted several hundred complaints, according to the French media regulator.

Mr Lagerfeld has previously attacked Mrs Merkel’s liberal stance on the issue of migrants, after she allowed more than a million asylum seekers into the country since 2015.

He continued: “Merkel had already millions and millions who are well integrated and who work and all is well. She had no need to take another million to improve her image as the wicked step-mother after the Greek crisis.

“Look at France, the land of human rights, which has taken, I don’t know, 10,000 or 20,000.”