A group of masked men were caught on camera brandishing Nazi flags and hurling antisemitic slurs outside an Anne Frank play in Michigan over the weekend.
The hateful protesters showed up outside the Howell American Legion where a community theater performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” was being put on in Howell, just outside Detroit, Saturday night, WXYZ reported.
“We had 75 people downstairs that watched that play and out of that 75, there were 50 or 60 of them that were afraid to leave this building,” Bobby Brite, a member of the veterans group, said.
“We had to escort them to their cars. No one in America should feel like that.”
Brite, who recorded the antisemitic ordeal, said the swastika-wielding men allegedly started shouting slurs at him when he confronted them.
Some also had “1488” scrawled across their masks — a known white supremacy symbol.
“People were shocked. They were appalled,” Brite, an Army vet, said. “Everything you would expect.”
Brite said the veterans group decided to host the play, which was performed by the Fowlerville Community Theatre, because of rising antisemitism across the country.
“It’s actually heartbreaking. It’s a terrible, terrible thing,” Brite said of the rising spate of antisemitism and hate in the US of late.
“I don’t know how we come away from it.”
Livingston County sheriff’s deputies responded to the incident but nothing turned violent.
No arrests were made.