A councillor who compared a prosecution lawyer to a Nazi concentration camp guard on Twitter has been fined €500.

The district court in Maastricht opted for a fine, half of it suspended, rather than the prosecution’s demand of a 40-hour unpaid work order against Heerlen councillor Christian Petermann.

Petermann, 40, attracted the ire of the prosecution service with a tweet about the sentencing of his fellow Limburg politician Jos van Rey. He wrote: ‘I hope Anja Janssen-De Boer or ‘the Irma Grese’ of the prosecution service is killed in an accident tonight.’ Grese was a female SS guard in Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.

Petermann deleted the offending tweets but returned to the subject in later interviews, suggesting that film director Paul Verhoeven should cast Janssen-De Boer as a guard in a film about Auschwitz.

In July a court ordered Van Rey to carry out 240 hours of community work, the highest available penalty, for taking bribes from a property developer while an alderman in Roermond. The former VVD senator was also found guilty of electoral fraud.