Vandals destroy Nazi artifacts from college display

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Vandals stole and stomped on items related to Nazism in a college exhibit about the Holocaust, damaging photographs of a propaganda poster and Adolf Hitler's autobiographical book "Mein Kampf," police said. Police were searching for suspects Thursday in the incident at Suffolk County Community College outside New York on Long Island. The exhibit included Hitler-era anti-Semitic propaganda, including disparaging caricatures of Jews, along with newspaper pages and other artifacts, said political science professor Steven Schrier. He runs the college's Center on the Holocaust, Diversity & Human Understanding, which maintained the exhibit. The vandals took some items from a display case Tuesday night and stepped on them or smashed them against a rock, said Suffolk County Police Detective Sgt. Robert Reeks. The suspects apparently targeted materials related to Nazism, leaving other objects alone, he said. "They definitely went to destroy them," Reeks said told Newsday. The building housing the exhibit, the college's Health, Sports & Education Center, was open at the time of the incident. The exhibit's curator has since emptied the Holocaust display case. "It does interfere with our ability to educate the public when we can't leave a display up like that for people to see," Schrier said.