Man wearing ‘Camp Auschwitz’ shirt among mob who stormed U.S. Capitol
An unidentified man wearing a sweatshirt reading “Camp Auschwitz” was among the violent mob that entered the U.S. Capitol Wednesday after a series of rallies that involved antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The man was visible in video stills from inside the Capitol, including a report from ITV, a British television channel. He was wearing what appeared to be a hooded sweatshirt with “Camp Auschwitz” printed above an image of a skull and crossbones, with the phrase “work brings freedom” printed below.
The phrase is a translation of “arbeit macht frei,” a slogan that appeared above the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The offensive outerwear was perhaps the most overt sign of antisemitism during the violent demonstration this afternoon, which came after a day and a half of inflammatory rallies promoting the false claim that the Democrats stole the November election from Presidential Donald Trump.
Several notorious white supremacists attended the rally outside the Capitol and were among those who broke through police lines to enter the building.
Arno Rosenfeld is a staff writer at the Forward. Follow him on Twitter @arnorosenfeld or email [email protected].
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO