Footage of a group singing a Nazi slogan in place of the lyrics of a disco hit while partying on an exclusive German party island went viral in the last week after it was posted on social media, triggering a wave of outrage.
The video, which was made on Sunday during Pentecost celebrations, shows people on the Sylt island drinking and dancing as the song “L’amour Toujours” plays in the background. Some in the group could be heard changing the lyrics to an old Nazi slogan, “Germany for the Germans – foreigners out.”
One of the participants could be seen raising his right arm in an apparent Nazi salute while imitating Hitler’s mustache by putting two fingers above his upper lip.
Both the slogan and the salute are illegal in Germany, and local enforcement said it was investigating the people who could be seen chanting in the video but hadn’t ruled out that other suspects could be involved.
The video was apparently filmed at a bar on the island named Pony. The owners posted on the bar’s Instagram account on Friday that they were “shocked and deeply dismayed” by the footage.
“Racism and fascism have no place in our society, and the fact that some people obviously see this differently leaves us stunned,” they wrote.
The post went on to say that if the staff had noticed what was happening at the time, it would have alerted the police immediately and filed a criminal complaint which the owners said they had done by the time they posted the statement.
The owners explained that the staff hadn’t noticed the chanting at the time because the day the video was made was one of the bar’s busiest of the year, and it had been too noisy to distinguish the words.
“We were able to identify and report the people in question. We do not tolerate this deeply anti-social behavior. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to combat it,” the owners wrote, adding that the people in the video would be banned from the bar for life.
German fashion influencer Milena Karl identified one of the women in the video as her personal assistant.
“Aside from the already abhorrent content of the video, I was shocked, hurt, and disappointed to see that one of the people in the video was employed by me,” Karl, an immigrant to Germany, posted on Instagram after the video went viral.
“There was no question in my mind that immediately after learning about this video, I would terminate the employment relationship with immediate effect and have already done so.”
Karl shared that she was pregnant and that “everything in the video” represented a society in which she did not want to raise her child.
Meanwhile, the German newspaper Taz reported on Friday that it had identified the man in the video who made the apparent Hitler mustache as an employee of a German marketing company called Serviceplan Group. Commenting on the video, the company told Taz that the man had been fired in light of his actions in the footage.
In a post on X on Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote that “such slogans are disgusting” and “unacceptable.”
According to the German-language paper The Luxemburger Word, this was not the first time the words of this particular song were replaced with the Nazi slogan at events in the country. According to the publication, German police had investigated at least three other similar incidents this year.