Pillow with Nazi symbols bought from site irks priest
A Fresno FRESNO, CALIF. — priest was shocked to find Nazi symbols and Adolf Hitler’s face on a throw pillow inside his home Monday morning while playing with his 5-month-old daughter.
When the Rev. Ryan Newman bought the pillow on walmart.com in November, he could see it featured large images of a bicycle and the Eiffel Tower, and the word “Paris.” What he didn’t see were Nazi party seals with swastikas, along with Hitler’s face on postage stamps with the German word “Reich” — referring to the Third Reich, the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 — on the top near the pillow’s seams. The images cover several inches on each side.
Newman said he was dumbfounded, and then angry and upset.
“To me this is a symbol of hate,” he said. “This is a symbol of evil.”
He said his work is about “preaching love and tolerance and reconciliation” as the new dean of St. James Episcopal Cathedral in central Fresno.
Newman and his wife, Erin, a physician at Valley Children’s Hospital, moved to Clovis in the fall. Their family heritage has some Jewish roots, including direct descendants who are Holocaust survivors.
He called and emailed Walmart about the pillow Monday but said he couldn’t get anyone to take his complaint seriously. Part of his email: “I’m outraged and feel very violated. For two months, this pillow has been in our house. My family, friends and colleagues have sat next to this pillow. I pray none of them noticed the pillow and didn’t say anything. The symbols portrayed on the pillows are offensive and wrong.”
Newman asked for an explanation from the company and that the item — described online as a retro Paris bicycle throw pillow — be removed from its website immediately.
Later that afternoon, Newman received what he called a generic email response from a customer service representative.
Part of that response: “Since your item is from a marketplace seller Dreamstrue LLC, as much as I would like to process a solution, we don’t have access in any marketplace seller items. Don’t worry, the best and the only thing we can do is to escalate this to the resolution team of the market place seller. I hope you understand. Rest assured this will be resolved by the Marketplace seller.”
The email assured Newman that he would receive an email or phone call within one business day. Shortly before that one-day window ended, the only response Newman said he received was another generic email, asking if his problem had been resolved.
Requests for comment from Dreamstrue LLC were not returned. The company is headquartered in Beaver Creek, Colorado, according to the Better Business Bureau.
The pillow was not removed from walmart.com until Tuesday, after The Bee reached out to Walmart for comment.
A Walmart spokeswoman provided the following statement: “This pillow was listed by a third-party seller on our online marketplace and is in violation of our policy. We regularly scan our marketplace for these types of items, but, unfortunately, the offensive image wasn’t visible on the pillow’s photo and we were not aware of it until the customer reached out. We removed the item immediately and are reviewing the seller’s assortment.”
Melissa Jordine, a history professor at Fresno State who teaches a number of courses related to World War II, the Holocaust, and Germany, said the images in question on the pillow are unmistakably from Nazi Germany.
She said the swastika with the eagle on the pillow is the seal of the Nazi party. On the pillow, it appears as a circular ink stamp over a print postage stamp displaying a portrait of Hitler. Jordine said the postage stamp appears to be one of those printed by the Nazi regime after Hitler became Germany’s leader in 1933. Paris was occupied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1944.