A Jewish boy has been repeatedly targeted with a Nazi marching song at his school.
The popular Nazi song, Erika, has gone viral on TikTok, attracting millions of views, and is used as background music in several video games.
In an article in the Telegraph, one boy is quoted as telling his mother that “everyone sings it and hums it in school”.
When the boy walked down a school hallway, fellow pupils shouted “Erika” and did Nazi salutes at him, according to the boy’s mother, whose name was anonymised in the article. She said her son “gets very emotional about it.”
Another parent told the Telegraph’s George Chesterton that the title “Erika” had been written on his daughter’s desk at school.
In June, footage was released of the Nazi song being played by students at Warwick University Conservative Association (UWCA). The university suspended the student group while it investigated the incident and UWCA apologised for the footage.
The song’s composer, Herms Niel, was a member of the Nazi party who created multiple military songs, and it was one of the Nazis’ most popular marching songs throughout WW2.
The Nazi song has been played on TikTok millions of times[Missing Credit]
One video of the song posted to TikTok has garnered over 1.4m views and is flooded with comments, including: “the best of the best”, “my favourite song”, “good old days,” and “this brings memories, my grandpa used to sing this to me all the time”.
Other social media users appeared to joke about the Hitler salute, commenting, “What happened to my hand” and “My hand is going up”.
Rabbi Jonny Hughes, whose charity the Abraham Effect works with schools to support Jewish pupils, said he had worked with non-Jewish schools on several occasions when Hitler salutes had been used to bully Jewish students.
“Swastikas have been drawn on dormitory doors at a boarding school,” he said, adding that a boy aged 12 or 13 was targeted by other students who drew a swastika on the back of his school uniform blazer.
“Young people are being intimidated by peers just because they are Jewish, with sinister whispering and sniggering,” Rabbi Johnny went on.
Meanwhile, a sobering report by the Community Security Trust revealed the first half of this year was the worst six-month period for antisemitism on record, with a 119 per cent rise in cases of antisemitism reported in schools.
CST logged 81 antisemitic incidents involving schoolchildren or staff at non-faith schools, comprising a record half-year total of 162 cases of antisemitism affecting people and property in the school sector. Thirty antisemitic incidents were reported in the first six months of 2024 at Jewish schools and a further 51 incidents involved Jewish schoolchildren away from school.
In one instance reported to the CST, a girl in a non-Jewish Kent school in February received abuse from boys in her class who called her a “dirty Jew”, said, “Heil Hitler” to her, and later added her to a WhatsApp group titled Holocaust.
