A man who removes graffiti said he was shocked to discover a swastika in a public park was apparently sanctioned by a suburban Montreal town.
Corey Fleischer runs a group called Erasing Hate, offering pro bono cleanup of these types of hate symbols.
Fleischer was called to Parc des Ancres in Pointes-des-Cascades in Vaudreuil-Soulanges on Thursday to remove a swastika from a decorative anchor at Park Saint-Pierre.
While he was cleaning up, Fleischer said the town’s mayor personally intervened, calling the police.
Fleischer caught the altercation with the Sureté du Quebec on video as officers tried to stop him from removing the symbol. He posted about the incident on Facebook.
“What I saw was anything but normal,” he said.
Fleischer said he's shocked that it was placed there in the first place and he said the Nazi symbols, in fact, appeared to be restored with fresh paint.
“I noticed the actual anchor had an engraving on it and it happened to be a swastika, so not only was there a swastika that was engraved onto the anchor, the city had painted the anchor tri-coloured, beige underneath the swastika, with a white circle and then to amplify it and to enhance it, they painted the swastika black,” he said.
Fleischer said he wanted to remove the symbol before a planned children's fair was held at the park.
“I decided to remove the paint around the swastika that the city had painted on this ancient WWII anchor,” he said.
“This is a public space. There is no room for any swastikas to be in a public domain.”
Mayor says anchor predates WWII
The municipality of Pointe des Cascades issued a statement Tuesday arguing that the swastika, in this case, is not a Nazi symbol.
The anchor, one of many in the park, was retrieved from Lake St. Louis near Beauharnois in 1988 by René Aubé.
According to historians with the Pointe des Cascades historical society there are several theories about the origins of the anchor.
The first is that the anchor was used by the German merchant marine, or could have come from a captured Nazi vessel that was then used by American-based shipping firms.
But according to Samuel Veniere of the Naval Museum of Quebec, the anchor is much older.
He told a reporter in 2016 that the anchor is from a ship operated by a British shipping line that operated in the 1800s.
The Byers brothers had multiple vessels built in the English port of Sunderland in the 1850s, and apparently used swastikas on their anchors as a good luck symbol.
For millennia the swastika was a symbol of good luck and well-being in the Indian subcontinent, but the Nazis appropriated the hooked cross in order to boast of a supposedly ethnically pure German lineage, and in doing so changed it into a symbol of hate and extermination.
Mayor Gilles Santerre said the town will install new plaques near the anchor that better explain its history.
