BERLIN (AFP) ― The leader of Germany’s “anti-Islamization” movement PEGIDA stepped down after a picture emerged of him sporting a Hitler-style haircut and moustache, along with racist slurs he posted on Facebook.
Addressing his followers on the social media site, Lutz Bachmann apologized for the “thoughtless statements that I would not make today.”
“I am sorry that I have damaged the interests of our movement with them and I am acting accordingly.”
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| A photograph shows German newspapers carrying pictures of PEGIDA leader Lutz Bachmann, allegedly posing as Hitler in Berlin on Wednesday. (AFP-Yonhap) |
A photo of Bachmann, 41, looking like Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had surfaced Wednesday, going viral on social media and sparking a storm of protest.
Media reports also said Bachmann had posted comments on Facebook in the past referring to refugees as “beasts” and “filth.”
Dresden’s public prosecutor was investigating whether to open a case against him on charges of incitement to hatred.
PEGIDA spokeswoman Kathrin Oertel welcomed Bachmann’s resignation, saying that his “Hitler selfie” had been “satire, which is every citizen’s right” but that “sweeping insults against strangers” went too far.
She said Bachmann had posted the picture in September, only weeks before he founded PEGIDA ― the “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” ― in the eastern city of Dresden.
Bachmann took the photo, which shows him with a small black moustache and hair parted to the side, around the time of the publication of a bestselling satirical audiobook about Hitler entitled “Look Who’s Back.”
The furor it caused has torpedoed PEGIDA’s recent efforts at a charm offensive with the media to present a more moderate image.
At their first-ever press conference this week, Bachmann and Oertel had distanced themselves from the neo-Nazis who had joined their rallies and said that most of their supporters were citizens fed up with contemporary politics.
About 15,000 right-wing protesters rallied meanwhile, this time in another eastern city, Leipzig, separated by riot police from over 20,000 antiracist counterdemonstrators.
The showing of PEGIDA’s Leipzig spin-off “LEGIDA” was far below the 40,000 its organizers had expected, in part because many access roads were blocked by almost 20 counterdemonstrations and vigils.
While the flag-waving nationalists chanted “We are the people,” co-opting the slogan of the former pro-democracy movement in communist East Germany, their opponents screamed “Nazis out.”
