A billboard featuring five children and a quote from Adolf Hitler will be removed after the advertising space outraged people and caused a backlash, the founder of a children's ministry in eastern Alabama said.
As an attempt to promote a church based in Opelika, Ala., the billboard space was rented by Life-Savers Ministries, Reuters reported.
The billboard at the Village Mall in Auburn featured five smiling children beneath a quote from Hitler in a 1935 speech on the Nazi youth movement: "He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future," the Ledger-Enquirer reported.
After garnering attention and drawing criticism on social media, the church requested for it be taken down on Tuesday.
According to Inquisitr, the billboard also featured a biblical verse from Proverbs, which read: "Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it."
Founder James Anderegg told the Ledger-Enquirer that the billboard featuring the Hitler quote was "certainly never intended to cause confusion."
"Herbert Hoover would have been a far better one to quote when he said, 'Children are our most valuable resource,'" Anderegg said. "We are a children's organization and had honorable intentions and nothing less."
The Hitler quote on the billboard was "put up at client request and will be taken down by client request," Hal Kishaw, a spokesman from Lamar Advertising, said.
The quote should have been approved by a few people before being put up, he said.
"Let that be a lesson: If you're going to pay for a billboard that makes a statement, make sure you run it by a few people to make sure the intended statement gets through to everyone," he added.
According to its website, Life-Savers Ministries was founded in 1996 and works with under-privileged children from local housing projects. Today, it has "six school buses and a magnificent facility of its own where hundreds of boys and girls are brought from around 20 different rough and tough locations throughout Opelika and Auburn, Alabama."
