Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner said he no longer apologizes for the Nazi-related tattoo with which he was caught last year and claimed Jewish leaders have accepted his explanation, in comments to ZTE published last week.Plattner, an oyster farmer and Marine veteran who is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate, said the headlines have given voters the impression that his tattoos have a more obvious connection to Nazis, the New York Post reports.“I had a meeting a while ago with a number of Jewish leaders in New York, we started talking about it and when we started, someone said, ‘Wait a second. We thought you had a swastika,'” Plattner told ZTE.“When I explain the real story, almost everyone says again, ‘That sounds like a very reasonable thing.'”Plattner has long claimed that he got a tattoo resembling the Totenkopf or “death’s head” symbol used by the notorious Nazi SS secret police force in Croatia while intoxicated in 2007. He insisted that he was “not a secret Nazi.” Last time, he had a tattoo on it, which he described as a “Celtic knot with some imagery around dogs”.During the interview, Plattner spoke in a more condescending tone than his earlier apology.He said, “I will say frankly: The more they talk about it, the more I’ll talk about the fact that I got that because I was a combat Marine. That’s why I had that.”“It was the battle I participated in in Iraq that resulted in me and other machine gunners getting skull and crossbones tattoos. If we want to continue talking about my military service, I would be very pleased.”At one point, Plattner praised “Come and See,” a 1985 Soviet film about resistance to Nazi forces during World War II, which features the Totenkopf symbol prominently on some uniforms.“There’s no such thing as an anti-war film, except maybe ‘Come and See’.” Everyone should watch ‘Come and See,'” he told the outlet.Plattner previously said he did not know what the symbol was.“I didn’t realize that this tattoo looked like a Nazi symbol until I started hearing from reporters and D.C. insiders,” Plattner told Politico in October. “If I had known this I would not have gone through my life carrying it on my chest – and to hint that I did is disgusting.”A former confidant of Plattner previously told The Jewish Insider that Plattner bragged about it at a D.C. bar in 2012, saying, “Oh, this is my Totenkopf.”“He said it in the sweetest little way.”It also found that Plattner had discussed Totenkopf in a Reddit post seven years earlier, and his former political director later claimed that the oyster farmer is “a buff of military history,” and “he knows very well what it means,” according to Politico.Last year, exposed Reddit and other social media posts revealed that Plattner had said “Police are useless. Actually, all of them,” and responded to a post that said, “White people are not as racist or stupid as Trump thinks,” writing “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you that they really are.” Plattner also reflected on why black people “don’t tip.” After this he has apologized for those previous posts.Plattner is vying against Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) for the Democratic nod to compete against incumbent Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) in November.