Minnesota students making Nazi salute and holding poster in photo spark outrage – By Peter Sblendorio (New York Daily News) / Jan 19 2019
A pair of Minnesota high schoolers sparked tremendous outrage after they snapped a photo doing the Nazi salute and holding a school dance invitation featuring multiple jokey puns involving Adolf Hitler and his German party.
The poster pictured in the photo reads, “Sweethearts would be a Hit(ler) w/ you, and I could Nazi myself going w/ anyone else. Be Mein? Yes or Nein.”
Officials who oversee Minnetonka High School denounced the students’ actions after the photo was posted to social media this week, with the superintendent addressing the situation in a memo to families in the district, according to NBC News.
“This kind of image causes great sadness and pain,” Dennis Peterson wrote. “I condemn what was done.”
Minnetonka principal Jeff Erickson, meanwhile, added in a statement that the photo “in no way aligns with our school’s core values,” referring to the post as “anti-Semitic.”
Peterson noted that the students will be disciplined, but Minnesota law prevents the penalties from being disclosed, according to news station Fox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul. He also stressed the need to improve the way students are being taught about Hitler and the Holocaust.
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The students, who have not been identified, reportedly took down the photo after the school officials found out about it.
Among those who slammed the picture was the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, which wrote in a statement that it is “deeply disturbed by the egregious anti-Semitic image circulating on social media depicting two Minnetonka High School students using the Nazi salute and making cruel and offensive jokes.”
The statement continued, “Such images both insult the memory of Hitler’s victims, as well as the heroic Minnesotans who fought to defeat Nazism.”
