HEAD Gypsy Billy Welch has invited a comedian to consider his actions ahead of a South Cumbria gig.

Jimmy Carr, who is due to play in Kendal next month, has been invited to visit Auschwitz by Mr Welch.

“Then he might appreciate the hurt and fear he has stirred up,” said Billy Welch, spokesman for the UK’s Roma population.

Mr Carr sparked a storm of protest with a joke on Netflix which described the murder of Roma and Sinti Gypsies in Nazi Germany.

Jews commemorate the holocaust on January 27, but Gypsy representatives hold their marking of the holocaust at the German death camp on August 2, the date the Nazis killed 4,254 Roma and Sinti on a single day in 1944.

Mr Welch, known as an organiser of Appleby Horse Fair, said estimates of the number of Gypsies murdered were generally underestimated. Usually, 200,000 to 500,000 were cited.

But they were just the ones in the death camps, he said. Most were wiped out in their own encampments.

“It was a military operation. The Gypsies were surrounded. The Nazis then killed them all, even children playing and women washing their hair.

“They raped women and young girls. They would take anything of value, including gold from their teeth.

“The Nazis stopped counting but the total murdered was somewhere between 1,500,000 and 2 million.

He said: “Carr should hear and see the scale of the slaughter for himself, then apologise when he understands the hurt and fear he has caused.

“His so-called joke was so offensive because there are many still living who witnessed the brutality of what happened, and many more who lost their families in barbarous and sadistic murders. Making a joke of it is too painful.”

Mr Carr’s management team said none of the controversial material from his Netflix special would be used in his current tour after councillors in Cambridge questioned whether he should play in the town.