‘I’m not a secret Nazi’: Anti-Israel US Senate candidate admits to having SS tattoo

An oyster farmer and progressive military veteran running an insurgent campaign for Maine’s Democratic Senate nomination admitted this week to having had a Nazi tattoo for nearly two decades. He later said he plans to have the tattoo removed.

Graham Platner shared video of himself shirtless, sporting the tattoo, on a popular progressive podcast. He denied that he himself ever held Nazi views, instead claiming he had gotten the tattoo while “inebriated” as a young adult without knowing what it meant.

Since launching his campaign this summer, the 41-year-old Platner had picked up steam in left-wing circles for his populist positions, including calling Israel’s military campaign in Gaza against Hamas a genocide. The political neophyte has won endorsements from progressive leaders including Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish. Morris Katz, the Jewish campaign strategist behind Zohran Mamdani’s digital ads for New York City mayor, made a campaign launch video for Platner.

Sanders said he was sticking with Platner after the Nazi tattoo was revealed, telling reporters that he is “an excellent candidate.”

“I’m going to support him,” Sanders added.

As of September 30, according to campaign finance records, Platner led his Democratic rivals in campaign donations with $3.2 million in contributions. At his rallies, the biggest applause comes when he delivers lines like “Our tax dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs that destroy schools and hospitals in Gaza.”

But scandal has started to plague Platner’s campaign in recent days after his past posts on the web forum Reddit came to light. In those posts, Platner made comments about why Black people don’t tip, derided rural white Americans and declared himself a Communist.

This week, a recent video of a shirtless Platner also surfaced in which he can be seen sporting a chest tattoo of a Totenkopf, a Nazi-era skull-and-crossbones design favored by SS officers. “Totenkopf,” or “Death’s Head,” was also the name of the division of officers who guarded the concentration camps.

The source of the video was Platner himself, who shared it on an episode of “Pod Save America” on Monday.

The Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, the state’s largest Jewish body, said in a statement that it was concerned about the tattoo as well as other aspects of Platner’s campaign.

“This tattoo appears to be a ‘death’s head’ symbol used by the SS, the organization most responsible for the genocidal murder of 6 million Jews and millions of other victims during WWII,” Zach Schwartz, director of the Portland-based group’s Jewish Community Relations Council, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hope that Mr. Platner would condemn, in no uncertain terms, the meaning behind this tattoo and everything it stands for.”

Schwartz added that Platner’s “broader messaging” also troubled them, in particular his pledge not to take money from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.

“Maine’s Jewish community is not a monolith, nor does every Jewish Mainer support AIPAC. However, Platner’s repeated, singular focus on not taking money from AIPAC plays into familiar, harmful tropes that Jews or organizations like AIPAC control the government,” the statement read. (An increasing number of Democratic candidates including Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, a centrist running for his state’s Senate primary, have also pledged not to accept money from AIPAC.)

On “Pod Save America,” Platner said he had gotten the tattoo in Croatia in 2007, while on shore leave from a tour of duty in Iraq, without knowing what it stood for.

“We went ashore in Split, Croatia, myself and a few of the other machine gun squad leaders. And we got very inebriated, and we did what Marines on liberty do, and we decided to go get a tattoo,” Platner told the show’s host Tommy Vietor.

He said he and his companions “chose a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines, and skull-and-crossbones are a pretty standard military thing. And we got those tattoos and then we actually all moved on with our lives.”

“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said elsewhere in the interview, adding that he had passed a full security clearance in 2018 to work as a State Department contractor. “If you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and antisemitism and racism in general. I would say a lifelong opponent.”

A recently surfaced video shows Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner with a chest tattoo of the SS Totenkopf, the skull-and-crossbones emblem used by Nazi “Death’s Head” units.

Platner has stated he got the tattoo while drunk as a young Marine on shore leave in… pic.twitter.com/euH926eTgA

— Maine State Press (@MaineStatePress) October 21, 2025

Platner did not address why he still has the tattoo. He has said he intends to stay in the race. He also claimed not to have known the symbol had Nazi connotations until getting wind of opposition research against him during his current Senate campaign.

“It was not until I started hearing from reporters and DC insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol. I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that – and to insinuate that I did is disgusting. I am already planning to get this removed,” he said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Platner added that in the 20 years since he got the tattoo, he enlisted in the Army, “which involved a full physical that examines tattoos for hate symbols. I also passed a full background check to receive a security clearance to join the ambassador to Afghanistan’s security detail.” The notion of his tattoo as a Nazi symbol never came up, he said.

However, quoting an anonymous former acquaintance of his, Jewish Insider reported on Tuesday that Platner had referred to the ink as “my Totenkopf” more than a decade ago and would frequently take his shirt off at the Washington, DC, bar where he worked at the time. “He said it in a cutesy little way,” the source said. Jewish Insider additionally reported that Platner had met with other men with Nazi links, including one neo-Nazi who is running for a seat on Bangor City Council.

Platner’s political director, former state senator Genevieve McDonald, resigned from his campaign last week following the reveal of his Reddit posts. On Facebook days after her resignation, McDonald also took Platner to task for his tattoo.

“Graham has an antisemitic tattoo on his chest,” McDonald wrote, according to screenshots of the post on social media. “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means. His campaign released it themselves to some podcast bros, along with a video of him shirtless and drunk at a wedding to try to get ahead of it.”

While some in the online left denounced Platner over the tattoo and rebuked previous support for him, he has kept some defenders. Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a Jewish military veteran, author and left-wing commentator, is one of them.

“Every other marine I knew had some version of the same tat. Please,” Rubin wrote on BlueSky, adding in a separate post, “This is a great example of what happens when the Democratic Party is defined by goody two-shoe losers who have lived their entire lives among fellow goody two-shoe losers.”

The Senate race against Republican incumbent Susan Collins is currently considered a toss-up and will be one of next year’s most closely watched elections.