In Taiwan, a Small Private High School Allowed a Controversial Cosplay-themed End of Year Assembly in an Outdoor Sports Ground on Campus and completely Out of View of the Public which Featured male and female Students Dressed in Nazi uniforms and Swastikas and one male Student giving the Nazi Salute which became a Focus on Social Media Posts in Taiwan

by Chris Horton, part-time stringer for the New York Times

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Taiwan — In central Taiwan, a nation of 23 million people that is not part of Communist China, a private high school student cosplay-themed end of year assembly outdoors on a sports field in which male and female students dressed as Nazi soldiers and carried swastika banners has created a storm of criticism among netizens and newspapers in one of Asia’s most open and democratic societies.

The privately-funded Hsinchu Kuang-Fu High School in Hsinchu City held the cosplay event , with the Nazi theme just one of several cosplay themes this year on display, as part of the school’s anniversary celebrations on Friday. The outdoor cosplay ''rally'' also featured non-moving SS-themed cardboard army tanks. The students at the local high school, which is not funded by the government, chose the theme, according to the Taipei Times.

Photographs of the event spread over the next few days in Taiwan [and overseas] through social media and news reports online, creating a backlash, with the diplomatic missions of Germany and Israel issuing letters of protest.

The episode resulted in the resignation of the school’s principal, Cheng Hsiao-ming, this week.

Cheng said that he took responsibility, adding that the primary issue was “our education’s problem. “It wasn’t necessarily a problem created by the students.”

In addition to the Israeli and German missions’ responses, the Orthodox Lubavitcher Taipei Jewish Center issued a statement expressing regret about “the use of Nazi imagery and logos by students in at a small private high school in central Taiwan, as it reopens historical wounds suffered by Germans, Gypsies, Poles, Russian and Eastern European Jews.”

A non moving cardboard tank at the Hsinchu Kuang-Fu High School in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. Credit EBC, via Associated Press

Ross Feingold, chairman of the Jewish center, there are about 100 Jews living in Taiwan, most of them teachers and journalists.

“Certainly it’s not meant to be an act of anti-Semitism,” Feingold said. “Holocaust education is extremely limited here.”

The incident in Hsinchu is not the first incident in which Nazi references have offended Germans and Jews living in Taiwan.

In 1999, an advertisement for German-manufactured DBK space heaters in Taiwan featured a smiling Hitler with the caption, “Declare war on the cold front!” The next year, a restaurant with a concentration camp theme opened, closing weeks after it became a source of outrage.

In 2001, the at the time and even now governing Democratic Progressive Party created a television advertisement contrasting Hitler with John F. Kennedy and other leaders, which the party modified after protests from the Israel Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei and others.

Officials at the school, which is private but receives subsidies from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, have said they will show their students movies such as “Schindler’s List” to better educate them on the atrocities of the Holocaust.

“A one-off showing of a movie is not a sustainable program,” Feingold said. “What is more sustainable is reaching out to the German and Jewish communities in Taiwan, many of whom have relatives who either served in Hitler's army as German soldiers or who died in or survived the Holocaust as Jews.”