Republican senator fires aide who used Nazi soldiers as Facebook profile picture

The Republican senator for Ohio, Jon Husted, has fired an aide who was discovered to have used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook profile photo.

Stephen Woytek was appointed as Husted’s political director last month in the senator’s knife-edge re-election contest against former Democrat senator Sherrod Brown. According to the Washington Post, Husted had decided to “part ways” with Woytek, 25, after learning that his Facebook profile showed he followed a military re-enactment group called LAH Living History Unit, which portrays the 1st SS Panzer division.

The group’s website says its members dress up as the Leibstandarte, a Waffen-SS armored division that began as Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards. LAH says the Leibstandarte “came to symbolize the highest dedication to duty and individual as well as collective loyalty”. The group claims to be “non-political” and insists is disavows “political and religious persecution” that happened the second world war.

A Spotify playlist recently created by an account bearing Woytek’s name hailed the former racist white-minority regime of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, seen as a symbol of white supremacy by some racist groups.

In a statement to the Post, a spokesperson for Husted said the campaign had ended its relationship with Woytek.

“While he denies negative intent, his social media activity displays a complete lack of judgement and disregard for its impact on others,” the spokesperson said. “Senator Husted demands better of those who represent him. Upon learning about the social media posts today, Senator Husted made the immediate decision to part ways.”

The campaign did not respond to the Post’s questions about whether and how Woytek’s social media activity had been vetted before his appointment, the newspaper reported.

Woytek’s departure follows a series of damaging episodes in which young Republicans groups have been discovered expressing pro-Nazi sympathies in group chats and internet forums. And in Georgia, Republican congressman Mike Collins’s campaign for Senate has been shaken by controversies involving his staff’s online activity. This summer, Collins replaced top aide, Kip Talley, after Slate revealed he had been part of a group chat with white supremacists.

Woytek, who serves in the national guard and was a graduate of the Citadel, a military academy based in Charleston, South Carolina, issued a statement of regret, saying he wished he had “exercised better judgment when posting about my activities online”.

“I want to be unequivocal: I reject the racist and antisemitic ideology the SS and Nazi Germany represented. I believe it is important to educate our younger generations, which is why I participate in historical reenactments,” he said.

LAH shared a photo on a Flickr account that showed Woytek in 2018 – when he was 16 – wearing an SS uniform and marching in an area adorned with Nazi flags. Woytek follows several suppliers of SS uniforms on his Facebook page.

On a Quora account bearing his name, Woytek also answered a question on whether anything good had occurred under Hitler, writing in 2017 “that Hitler started an anti-smoking campaign”.

More recently, he created a public playlist of pro-Rhodesia songs on Spotify called “Tales from Rhodesia”, which is captioned: “Homesick for a place that no longer exists.” One of the songs uses a slur to refer to African troops.

The former British colony’s white minority government fought a long war against guerrilla groups after issuing a unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. The country was officially recognized as Zimbabwe under black majority rule in 1980, a year after the minority government accepted its rule was unsustainable and entered peace negotiations.

Rhodesia has been used by white supremacists as a symbol of the supposed superiority of white rule.