Amusement park closes ride shaped like swastika

• An amusement park in Germany shut down a new attraction this week after complaints that it resembled a pair of giant, spinning swastikas that lifted riders into the sky over the Black Forest town of Löffingen.

The ride, called the Eagle’s Flight, included a set of four eagle-shaped cars, each connected at a right angle to a central axis, giving it a swastika- like appearance that was only amplified when it rose from the ground and twirled in the air.

Officials from the park, Tatzmania, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Wednesday. Rüdiger Braun, the owner of the park, told reporters from the European Broadcasting Union that until the backlash, he had not noticed the ride’s resemblance to the symbol of Nazi Germany.

Braun told the news service that he apologized “to all persons who feel disturbed and insulted by our design” and said that the ride would be redesigned to have three cars on each arm instead of four.

“Then we will have this problem under control,” he said. When the ride was first noted on social media earlier this month, the reaction was a stew of outrage, mockery and tasteless humour.

“Goebbels approves,” a commenter on Reddit remarked in reference to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Since the founding of the country’s democracy after the Second World War, German law has prohibited the public display of symbols from banned organizations like the Nazi Party. That includes the swastika as well as the stiff- armed salute associated with Adolf Hitler.

The theme park controversy in Löffingen comes at a delicate time in Germany. The country has grappled in recent years with a surge in anti- Semitic crime and support for far-right, anti-immigrant groups.

In May, the federal government issued a report that said anti- Semitic crime and hate crime targeting foreigners rose by almost 20 per cent in 2018. Those offences included assault, verbal attacks, graffiti, online hate speech and the use of Nazi symbols.

The next month, Germany experienced what appears to have been the first far- right political assassination since the Nazi era when Walter Lübcke, a regional politician from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre- right party, was fatally shot outside his home. He had been the target of multiple death threats for defending Merkel’s policy of taking in refugees.

None of that appears to have been on the mind of Tatzmania’s management when they inaugurated the Eagle’s Flight.

The park began advertising the ride on Facebook on Aug. 2 with a post that included a picture of it in action, one swastika- like arm partially concealed behind a tree.

“Let yourself be surprised!” the park’s management wrote.