Magazine criticized for ‘Nazi’ Trump cover
A German magazine has been criticized for a cover depicting President Trump giving a Nazi salute while draped in an American flag.
The cover of the latest edition of Stern bears the headline “Sein Kampf,” or “His Struggle”— a play on Adolf Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.” Below is written: “Neo-Nazis, Ku-Klux-Klan, racism: As Donald Trump stirs hatred in America.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based human rights organization that researches the Holocaust and hate, denounced the cover in a statement. “President Trump is fair game for serious criticism by the public and media at home and abroad. But the depiction of the president as a latter-day Hitler by a major German publication is untrue and beyond the pale,” said Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper in the centre’s statement.
“Germans must surely know that by misappropriating the Swastika, the Sieg Heil, and other Nazi symbols and terms associated with Adolf Hitler, they belittle and becloud the crimes of the past, and add heat but shed no light or perspective on the serious struggles and disagreements that currently beset our democracy,” they added.
The magazine cover was also condemned by German historian Michael Wolffsohn, who said, “Unlike Hitler, Trump did not incite a world war with 57 million deaths plus a Holocaust.”
Trump was criticized for blaming “both sides” after Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when a car was driven into counterprotesters at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12.