Bernie Sanders-backed Senate hopeful backtracks on apology for ‘Nazi skull’ tattoo insisting it’s an ’eminently reasonable skull-and-crossbones’
Josh Boswell
Daily Mail
March 15, 2026
A Democrat running for Senate in Maine who previously apologized for a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol is now defending the design as nothing more than a skull-and-crossbones.
Graham Platner, who hopes to run against incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins, was mired in scandal last year when it was revealed he has a tattoo on his chest resembling the Nazi ‘Totenkopf’ or ‘death’s head’ symbol adopted by Hitler’s SS.
He has since had it altered to resemble some kind of animal.
At first Platner apologized, saying he didn’t realize the symbol was associated with Nazism, and promised he’d get it removed.
But in an interview this week with news blog Zeteo, Platner pushed back, defending the tattoo as merely a ‘skull-and-crossbones’ and ‘an eminently reasonable thing’.
During the interview he also recommended the war movie Come and See, which prominently and repeatedly shows the similar ‘Totenkopf’ on Nazi uniforms.
‘Everybody should watch Come and See,’ he said.
The fact that the 1985 film is one of his favorites may undermine his claims that he didn’t know the association of the symbol with Nazis.
Platner did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Mail.
When the tattoo scandal emerged in October, Platner told the Washington Post that he was only told of its Nazi association ‘a few days ago’.
But an unidentified former acquaintance of Platner told The Jewish Insider that he had called the tattoo a ‘Totenkopf’, during a 2012 conversation at DC bar the Tune Inn.
‘He said “Oh, this is my Totenkopf”,’ the source told the news site. ‘He said it in a cutesy little way.’
In unearthed Reddit posts from 2019, Platner weighed in on a conversation about the Totenkopf, saying he knew of US service members using skull imagery, further suggesting he was aware of the symbol’s significance years ago.
Platner has told the press that he got the tattoo with a group of friends during a night of drinking in Croatia in 2007 while he was on leave from serving as a US marine.
His former political director wrote in a Facebook post that ‘he’s a military history buff,’ and ‘he knows damn well what it means’, according to a report in news site Politico.
The political director, Genevieve McDonald, resigned in October when Platner’s incendiary past Reddit comments were unearthed.
The posts included calling rural, white Americans ‘racist’ and ‘stupid’, but also asking why black people ‘don’t tip’, and suggesting those worried about being raped should ‘take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f***ked up’.
He has since apologized for those comments, saying they were made when he was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after leaving the military.
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