Thai university apologizes for Hitler superhero mural

Thailand’s leading university has issued an apology following a Saturday report on a mural displayed at the school that depicted Adolf Hitler among a group of superheroes.

“Regarding your report on the mural displayed at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts on graduation day, the Chulalongkorn University Communication Center, on behalf of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, would like to express our sincere regret and apologize [to] the public and the media for such offensive material that was exhibited,” Chulalongkorn University wrote to The Times of Israel on Monday.

After an investigation, university officials found that “the mural was created by a group of students who were unaware of its significance, and who have now been given an official verbal warning.”

“We have made an official apology to the Simon Wiesenthal
Center on this matter and will make every effort to ensure
that an incident of this kind will never occur again,” the school said.

The huge billboard was placed outside the art faculty of Chulalongkorn University as part of a tribute to this year’s graduating class. It said “Congratulations” in bold white letters and showed Hitler with his arm raised in a Nazi salute next to Batman, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man.

The billboard was up for two days before being removed in response to criticism. Online photographs showed graduating students in their robes, mimicking Hitler’s raised arm salute.

“(We) would like to formally express our sincere apology for our students’ ‘Superhero’ mural,” art school dean Suppakorn Disatapundhu said in a general statement issued Monday. “I can assure you we are taking this matter very seriously.”

Suppakorn said that freshman art students had painted the banner as part of a traditional send-off from incoming students to the graduating class, and it was one of dozens of banners and billboards across the campus during the university’s commencement period.

The artistic vision behind the picture was to show that good and bad people co-exist in the world, Suppakorn said after summoning the students for an explanation.

“They told me the concept was to paint a picture of superheroes who protect the world,” the dean said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.

“Hitler was supposed to serve as a conceptual paradox to the superheroes,” he said, noting that the superheroes were painted in vivid colors, while Hitler’s image was in gray scale. “This kind of thoughtless display will not happen again.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights group, criticized the banner prior to its removal.

“Hitler as a superhero? Is he an appropriate role model for Thailand’s younger generation — a genocidal hate monger who mass murdered Jews and Gypsies and who considered people of color as racially inferior,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the center, said in a statement Friday. “The Simon Wiesenthal Center is outraged and disgusted by this public display at Thailand’s leading school of higher education.”

The study of history in the Thai school system revolves primarily around the history of Thailand and its long line of kings. World history is glossed over, with little or no mention of the Holocaust.