Pegida leader resigns after photograph of him posing as Adolf Hitler emerges
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Lutz Bachmann resigns as leader of the anti-Islam movement which has seen crowds of up to 25,000 people marching against what they say is the “Islamisation” of the West
Pegida leader Lutz Bachmann posted this image on his Facebook with the caption 'he is back'
The founder of Germany’s anti-Islam movement Pegida has resigned as one of its leaders after a photograph emerged of him posing as Adolf Hitler.
Lutz Bachmann, who started the movement which has seen crowds of up to 25,000 people marching against what they say is the “Islamisation” of the West, offered his resignation to its executive board after it emerged he had posted a photograph of himself as Hitler on his Facebook page with the caption: “He’s back”.
Mr Bachmann insisted the picture, in which he appears with a distinctive toothbrush moustache and swept-across fringe, had been intended as “a joke”.
But it quickly went viral after it was published by Dresdner Morgenpost, a local newspaper in his native Dresden, and proved devastating for a movement that has always insisted it has no links with neo-Nazis or the far right.
Mr Bachmann’s resignation came as public prosecutors in Dresden said they had launched an investigation of him over racist comments made in a series of Facebook posts published by the newspaper.
Mr Bachmann and the other Pegida leaders have repeatedly insisted they are not racist or xenophobic, but only concerned at what they say is the erosion of traditional German culture at the hands of immigrants.
But in a series of Facebook comments reproduced by the Dresdner Morgenpost, Mr Bachmann appeared to describe immigrants and asylum-seekers as “filth”, “trash” and “brutes”.
“There are no real war refugees,” he appeared to say in another post, which went on argue that any asylum-seeker who could afford to travel to Europe was not in real danger.
“I apologise sincerely to all citizens who feel offended by my posts,” Mr Bachmann said in a statement released by Pegida.
“There were inconsiderate remarks that I would not make it today. I am sorry that I have so harmed the interests of our movement.”
He earlier defended the picture of him as Hitler, saying it was intended as a joke to coincide with the release of an audiobook version of a bestselling satirical novel in which Hitler returns to modern Germany, entitled Er ist wieder da, or He’s Back.
“You have to take the mickey out of yourself sometimes,” Mr Bachmann told Bild newspaper.
“As an organisation we strongly reject Lutz Bachmann’s Facebook posts from September which have now been published,” Kathrin Oertel, another Pegida leader, said.
“Lutz Bachmann has achieved a lot for Pegida. He brought the movement to the street and in the media and made it possible for us to mobilise and inspire tens of thousands. We regret this development.”
Mr Bachmann’s resignation raises questions over Pegida’s future without its most charismatic speaker and figurehead. He largely created the movement under the banner of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West, or Pegida. A few hundred people turned up to his first protest, in October, but attendance grew dramatically, and 25,000 people took part in the most recent march, last week.
Mr Bachmann was the target of a specific assassination threat by suspected Islamists that caused police to order the cancellation of a planned Pegida march on Monday.
Pegida leaders disowned a rally on Wednesday night by a far more radical offshoot of the group in the city of Leipzig calling itself Legida.
The atomsphere in the city was described as “tense”, with the centre in lockdown and around 4,000 police were deployed to avoid clashes between Legida supporters and counter-protestors at 19 separate demonstrations.
Legida’s leaders have openly called for Germany to renounce its “culture of war guilt” over the crimes of the Nazis, and Pegida said it was considering an injunction
From: telegraph.co.uk
