Story highlights Leader of anti-Islamization group said he took Hitler photo as "joke" to coincide with audiobook release

PEGIDA, which says it fights against Islamization of the West, has organized rallies drawing as many as 25,000

Newspaper published the Hitler photo Wednesday, but image was posted on Facebook months ago

(CNN) As thousands-strong anti-Islamization rallies make headlines in Germany following the Charlie Hebdo attack, one of the rallies' organizers has resigned as leader of a right-wing group after a newspaper published a months-old selfie of him posing as Adolf Hitler.

The photo shows Lutz Bachmann, leader of PEGIDA, which translates in English to Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. It appeared Wednesday on the cover of German tabloid BILD.

Bachmann resigned as chairman of the group following the backlash to the Hitler photo, as well as another image Bachmann posted of a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe with the caption, "Three K's a day keeps the minorities away."

"I apologize to everybody who has felt attacked by my online postings. They were comments made without serious reflection, which I would no longer express today. I am sorry that I thereby damaged the interests of our movement, and draw the appropriate conclusion," Bachmann said in Dresden.

Bachmann also posted a photo of a Ku Klux Klansman.

The selfie was an act of satire, his spokeswoman Kathrin Oertel said on Facebook. While every citizen has the right to engage in satire, she wrote, insulting foreigners is not satirical.

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