In comments to Zeteo last week, Maine Senate candidate Graham Plattner said he would no longer apologize for a Nazi-related tattoo that was discovered last year and claimed Jewish leaders accepted his explanation.Plattner, an oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran running for Democratic Senate, said the headlines left voters with the impression that his tattoos had a more obvious connection to Nazis, the New York Post reported.“I had a meeting with some Jewish leaders in New York not long ago, and we started discussing this, and as we started, someone said, ‘Wait a minute. We thought you had a swastika,'” Plattner told Zeteo.“When I explain the true story, almost everyone says again, ‘That seems like a very reasonable thing to do.'”Plattner has long claimed that he got the tattoo while drunk in Croatia in 2007, and that the tattoo looks like the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol used by the notorious Nazi SS secret police force. He insists he is “not a secret Nazi.” Last fall, he got a tattoo on it that he calls a “Celtic knot with some images of dogs on it.”In the interview, Plattner struck a more defiant tone than in previous apologies.“I’ll be honest: The more they talk about it, the more I talk about the fact that I got this because I’m a combat Marine. That’s why I got this,” he said.“It was the combat I fought in Iraq that led me and other machine gunners to get skull tattoos. If we want to continue talking about my military service, I’m more than happy to do that.”At one point, Plattner praised the film “Come and See,” a 1985 Soviet film about the resistance to Nazi forces during World War II, in which the “Totenkopf” logo was prominently displayed on some uniforms.“There are no anti-war movies except Come and See. Everyone should watch Come and See,” he told the outlet.Plattner previously said he had no idea what the symbol was.“It wasn’t until I started hearing from reporters and Washington, D.C. insiders that I realized the tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol,” Plattner told Politico in October. “If I had known this, I would never have carried this thing with me my whole life – and to suggest that I did is disgusting.”A former close friend of Plattner previously told Jewish Insider that Plattner bragged about it in a Washington bar in 2012, saying, “Oh, this is my Totenkopf.”“He said that in a cute way.”Plattner was also caught discussing Totenkopf in a Reddit post seven years ago, with his former political director later claiming the oyster farmer was a “military history buff” and “he knew exactly what that meant,” Politico reported.Last year, unearthed Reddit and other social media posts showed Plattner venting that “cops are mean. In fact, all of them are,” responding to a post that said “white people are not as racist or stupid as Trump thinks they are,” and writing, “Living in white rural America, I wouldn’t dare tell you that they actually are.” Plattner also mused on why black people “don’t tip.” He has since apologized for past posts.Plattner is vying for the Democratic nomination against Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) and will run against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in November.
