An empty classroom is seen at a school closed as part of a government decision to curb the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease, a day before a nationwide lockdown begins, in Jerusalem, Israel, Sept. 17, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad.

Administrators at a small-town high school in western Pennsylvania scurried this week to assure parents and media that neo-Nazism is frowned upon after a student contributed a quote promoting Holocaust denialism to the annual yearbook of Franklin Regional Senior High School.

According to local news outlets, the student slipped the quote “271k or not enough” past the yearbook committee’s editors, none of whom knew its connection to the neo-Nazi community’s belief that Nazi Germany killed nowhere near the 6 million Jews murdered in World War II.

As explained by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the false “271k” figure emerged from a pseudo-historical claim that the Red Cross kept internal documents reporting that Adolf Hitler’s regime murdered no more than 300,000 Jews, a fabrication the organization has discredited numerous times.

The so-called “secret documents” later came into the hands of a Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, who unsuccessfully submitted them as evidence in a criminal trial in which a German court found him guilty of racial hatred and other disreputable offenses.

The student’s knowledge of “271k” and Zundel’s criminal trial is indicative of a torrid interest in antisemitic conspiracies, Nazism, and white supremacy. District officials said on Monday that they have launched a review of the yearbook’s processes to determine how the quote managed to make it into an official school document issued both as a memento for graduating seniors and a history of the academic year.

In the meantime, Franklin Regional Senior High School has already punished the student — whose name, background, and path toward radicalization remain unknown to the public — barring him from walking in graduation.

“It was determined that the staff member who supports the yearbooks creation was unaware of the meaning behind the statement,” the Franklin Region School District said in a statement. “The Franklin Regional School District does not condone this type of behavior, and there is no room for hate speech in our community.”

The district’s statement went on to underscore the permanence of the offense, adding, “While republishing was carefully considered, the financial and logistical challenges associated with collecting and redistributing yearbooks were not feasible, as the last of school was Friday, June 5.”

Meanwhile, local Jewish community leaders are outraged.

“It’s a call to kill Jews, and it’s minimizing the pain that the community went through in the Holocaust,” David Heyman, a senior official for the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, told a local ABC affiliate. “We understand that the school did take action and kept the student from participating in graduation, which we think was an appropriate response.”

Heyman stressed that next year’s yearbook staff should be punctilious in reviewing content submitted by students, saying, “I think our advice would be if it’s unclear what a student is referring to, calls for some research to understand what it is that they’re trying to communicate.”

The Franklin Regional Senior High School incident comes amid a wave of US students and young adults seemingly adopting neo-Nazi rhetoric.

In October, a conservative student magazine at Harvard University published an essay which chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. The opinion piece, written by undergraduate David X.F. Army, proclaimed “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.” It also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own” in response to concerns over large-scale migration of Muslims into Europe.

In Nazi ideology, “blood and soil,” or Blut und Boden, justified the party’s drive to encode eugenics and notions of racial purity in law; the German “Aryans” right to expand into Eastern Europe to amass new Lebensraum, or “living space”; and the transformation of the German peasantry into an agricultural class which stood in contrast to Jews, many of whom lived in cities.

Public universities are seeing their own manifestations of students translating these ideas to action. In March, the University of Florida shuttered its College Republicans chapter at the request of the Florida Federation of College Republicans (FFCR), because two of its leaders photographed themselves pantomiming the Nazi salute.

The incident marked the second time that month in which conservative youth were publicly outed for indulging Nazism and the white supremacist movement.

Days earlier, leaked texts revealed dozens of antisemitic and racist texts exchanged by young Republicans in Miami-Dade County, Florida, some of which fantasized about engaging in onanism in an all-white country.

As first reported by The Miami Herald, the group chat, created on WhatsApp, was described by its members as “Nazi heaven” for the daily barrage of extremist comments contributed to it. Individuals affiliated with the Miami-Dade Country Republicans, Turning Point USA, and College Republicans casually said “ni—er,” denounced women as “whores,” and spoke rapturously about Hitler.

Dariel Gonzalez, according to the Herald, was one of the chat’’ most prolific contributors, bandying about comments regarding “color professors” and telling members that “You can f–k all the k—kes you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.”

Prominent conservative leaders have said that growing antisemitism on the right must be acknowledged and fought.

“Listen, about a decade ago, antisemitism began rising on the left, and the Democrat Party did nothing,” US Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, said in October. “But the danger that I want to highlight to you tonight is not antisemitism on the left, it is antisemitism on the right. And I’m here to tell you that in the last six months, I have seen antisemitism rising on the right in a way I have never seen it in my entire life.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.