Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, praised a “cool pic” of Nazi-aligned troops aiming a rifle during World War II, zeroing in on their “German helmets” and weapon, in a now-deleted social media post, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
It’s not the first time Platner has shown enthusiasm for Nazi iconography. He notoriously had a chest tattoo of an SS “Totenkopf,” the skull and crossbones symbol worn by SS officers who manned the Nazi concentration camps.
In April 2019 a Reddit user shared an image of “Swedish Volunteer Battalion in a trench during The Continuation War, 1941.”
The image showed soldiers in German helmets during the conflict, pointing a Browning Automatic Rifle at the enemy over a defensive trench. A soldier gesturing to an enormous dog—which appears to be an Alsatian or German shepherd—dominates the foreground.
In a comment from his now-deleted Reddit account P-Hustle, Platner offered this response:
“German helmets and a [Browning Automatic Rifle]. What a cool pic.”
As John Levine of the Washington Free Beacon adds in a tweet, “If NOTHING else — this post shows that Platner is a deep in the weeds WWII military history nerd, making it especially unlikely he wouldn’t know what a Totenkopf was.”