Pennsylvania artist sorry for including Nazi camp arch on school parade float

Oops! All Arbeit Macht Frei!

A Pennsylvania artist’s efforts to create a Halloween float for a local Catholic school went awry when he inadvertently included a replica of the gateway arch from a Nazi concentration camp, prompting a hasty apology from the diocese of Harrisburg.

In apologizing for the fiasco, Galen Shelly told PennLive that a lighted archway and lanterns he ordered to decorate a parade float he was building for Hanover’s St Joseph’s school did not arrive in time – so he searched the internet for images of cemetery gates to represent the idea that “none of us get out of this life alive”.

What he found, and replicated, was a photograph of the gates from the second world war Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, among the most notorious of the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust in which at least 6 million Jewish people were systematically murdered.

The float, captured in images of the 30 October parade posted to Facebook by the Hanover Area Watch group, featured Shelly’s cloned archway containing the German phrase Arbeit Macht Frei – work sets you free – a slogan the Nazis placed at the entrance of numerous concentration camps to mock those who passed through the gates to face brutality and extermination.

“I had no ill intent,” Shelly told PennLive. “I made a mistake and I am deeply sorry.

How the fuck do you not know that "Arbeit Macht Frei" is a loaded term?