Man Shouts 'Heil Hitler, Heil Trump' At Performance of Fiddler on the Roof

A man disrupted a performance of "Fiddler on the Roof" in Baltimore Wednesday night after standing up and shouting "Heil Hitler," and "Heil Trump" while giving the Nazi salute, witnesses say.

The man shouting the pro-Nazi and Trump slogans at the Hippodrome Theater prompted dozens of audience members to run for the exits, as people feared the shouts could be the beginning of another mass shooting. 

Audience member Rich Scherr recorded video of the incident, and and posted it to Twitter, commenting, "Sick, sad world." 

"People started running," Scherr told the Baltimore Sun. "I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’"

Another patron, Samit Verma, told the newspaper in an email that he was seated in the balcony area when he heard the man shouting. Verma said he looked over to see a man holding his hand straight up in a Nazi salute. 

"The people around me appeared to be quite shaken by the incident," Verma wrote. "There were some people in tears."

Ushers rushed over to the man while others in the audience attempted to make their way out of the theater and into the hallway. 

Security escorted the man out of the theater a few minutes later a police spokeswoman said. The audience applauded once the man removed, witnesses said. 

"We do not tolerate behavior like we saw last night during intermission at 'Fiddler,'" the theater tweeted. "Our venue has a proud tradition of providing shared experiences to people from all walks of life and we will continue that tradition."

Police issued a stop ticket to the man, but did not arrest him according to a statement from the department. A 'stop ticket' is the least severe measure police can take when responding to a complaint according to the Sun. 

“As reprehensible as those words are, they are considered protected free speech because nobody was directly threatened,” police spokesman Matt Jablow said.

"Fiddler on the Roof" is a play about the plight of a Jewish family as it faces persecution in tsarist Russia. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported this week that hate crimes have spiked for a third year in a row, increasing by 17 percent in 2017. Of the more than 7,100 hate crimes reported, nearly three out of five were reportedly motivated by race and ethnicity, the annual report noted. 


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