The photo shows Lutz Bachmann, leader of PEGIDA, which translates in English to Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. It appeared Wednesday on the cover of German tabloid BILD.
Bachmann resigned as chairman of the group following the backlash to the Hitler photo and another image in which Bachmann appeared in a Ku Klux Klan robe with the caption, “Three K’s a day keeps the minorities away.”
“I apologize to everybody who has felt attacked by my online postings. They were comments made without serious reflection, which I would no longer express today. I am sorry that I thereby damaged the interests of our movement, and draw the appropriate conclusion,” Bachmann said in Dresden on Wednesday.
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Dresden already had a well-established network of right-wing extremists before PEGIDA’s emergence, he said.
“It’s more a case of East Germans not entirely feeling at home in Germany,” Forbrig said. “There is a feeling of second-class citizenship, and in order to be heard, many East Germans take to radical measures.”
CNN’s Rick Noack and Susannah Cullinane contributed to this report.
