Nazi Slogans At Coronavirus Lockdown Protest Draws Rebuke From Auschwitz Museum

At a Chicago rally where hundreds of protestors demanded a rollback on coronavirus restrictions, a woman was photographed carrying a sign bearing the words “Arbeit Macht Frei, JB,” apparently referring to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who comes from a prominent Jewish family.

The Auschwitz Memorial Museum, the organization that maintains the former concentration camp in Poland, replied to the photo via Twitter, calling the phrase one of the “icons of human hatred,” and saying it was “painful to see this symbol instrumentalized [and] used again to spread hate.”

The woman’s sign, with what appears to be a stylized, upside-down “B,” is startlingly similar to the phrase’s appearance on the sign at the entrance of Auschwitz, the most notorious of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, where more than 1 million people were murdered. 

The photo quickly went rival and earned condemnation; Illinois native and the American ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro called the sign “disgusting” while the head of the American Jewish Committee David Harris said it was “shameful, shocking [and] sickening.”

The first person to post a picture of the sign was nurse Dennis Kosuth, who told The Hill he had attended the Chicago rally as a counter protestor—he said he took the photo himself and that the woman holding the sign told him she was not a Nazi and “[has] Jewish friends,” according to Kosuth. 

Another protester at the Chicago rally reportedly held a poster that read: “Heil, Pritzker,” and included an image of a swastika.