Lutz Bachmann, the leader and founder of fast-growing German anti-Muslim movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Wes), resigned from the group after a photo of him posing as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler went viral.
PEGIDA spokeswoman Kathrin Oertel said that Bachmann had resigned from the group's board not because of the Hitler photo — which she dismissed as a "joke" and "satire, which is every citizen's right" — but rather because of comments he made on Facebook calling asylum-seekers "scumbags" whose manner at welfare offices required extra security "to protect employees from the animals." Bachmann, 41, apologized for those comments.
But the Hitler photos made the anti-immigrant leader toxic. "Anyone in politics who poses as Hitler is either a total idiot or a Nazi," Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told German newspaper Bild. "Reasonable people do not follow idiots, and decent people don't follow Nazis." PEGIDA has drawn tens of thousands of people to marches in Dresden over the past few months; Bachmann and this group insist they are not racist and do not harbor Nazi sympathies.
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