Vile stickers from a group comparing themselves to one of history’s most famous resistance movements have appeared at pedestrian crossings in Melbourne – stoking outrage from the Jewish community.
The stickers, one of which was posted at Gilbert Road, Reservoir, shows images of the Star of David, Adolf Hitler and a syringe.
“What’s the difference between vaccine papers and a yellow star?” it reads. “82 years. We are increasingly living under National Socialism. Stop medical apartheid.”
The group posting the stickers appear to compare themselves to the White Rose movement against the Nazis in the 1940s.
The White Rose was a nonviolent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany led by a group of five students and a professor from the University of Munich, including Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christopher Probst, and Sophie Scholl.
The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime.
Their activities started in Munich on June 27, 1942, and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on February 18, 1943.
They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People’s Court, and many of them were sentenced to death or imprisonment.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, told news.com.au the stickers posted by the group in Melbourne comparing themselves to the White Rose were “hateful and cruel”.
“Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans are probably turning in their grave at the sight of this moral outrage,” he said.
“To hijack the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and millions of others were slaughtered and burned, to suggest that Hitler’s Final Solution is comparable to lifesaving vaccination efforts is to trivialise and downplay humanity’s most immense tragedy.
