Wrong role model Wrong role model

Alabama youth group pulls Hitler billboard

Life Savers Ministries’ founder apologizes, says organization ‘never intended to cause confusion’ with quote about children

Hitler youth on bikes. (photo credit: CC BY-SA  German Federal Archive, Wikimedia Commons)
Hitler youth on bikes. (photo credit: CC BY-SA German Federal Archive, Wikimedia Commons)

An Alabama billboard quoting Adolf Hitler is being taken down at the request of the advertising company that leased the space.

The advertisement for Life Savers Ministries, a Christian youth program, features five smiling children beneath the quote attributed to Hitler, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future,” according to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia.

It went up May 31 on a Lamar Advertising billboard near a mall in Auburn, Ala., and was to be removed Tuesday.

“We are pulling the billboard and certainly never intended to cause confusion,” Life Savers Ministries founder James Anderegg told the Ledger-Enquirer.

He added, “Herbert Hoover would have been a far better one to quote when he said, ‘Children are our most valuable resource.’ We are a children’s organization and had honorable intentions and nothing less.”

The Opelika, Ala., group, founded in 1996, serves “hundreds of boys and girls brought from around 20 different rough and tough locations,” according to its website.

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