A man who uploaded a video of himself teaching a dog the Nazi salute faces jail.

Markus ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan, from Scotland, drew ire in 2016 after uploading a video to YouTube entitled ‘M8 yer dugs a Nazi’. In it Meechan says he wants to turn his girlfriend’s pug (named Buddha) into the “least cute thing” he could think of. He then trains him to give a Nazi salute in response to the terms ‘Sieg Heil’ and ‘you want to gas the Jews?’.

Meecham is also heard playing Adolf Hitler speeches to Buddha.

The YouTuber has now been found guilty of hate crime.

“I don’t actually hate Jewish people,” Meecham said, as reported by The Jewish Chronicle. “The video was just an insight into the darker side of my humour, a prank to annoy my girlfriend and that I did not intend for people, other than people who knew my comedy, to see the video.”

He also described the holocaust as “an awful thing [that] should never have happened,” adding that “we still joke about it, because in our eyes laughing about terrible things often make them easier to deal with”.

Here boy

The court acknowledged the importance of freedom of expression, but went on to say that such freedoms bring with them responsibility.

“In many ways, the bit I found most offensive was the repetition of ‘gas the Jews’ rather than the dog itself,” director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities Ephraim Borowski told the court.

“The other thing that struck me was the explicit statement that this was intended to give offence and intended to be the most offensive thing he could think of and then he says he isn’t a racist. But unfortunately we hear that all the time from people. The Holocaust is not a subject for jocular content.”

Borowski added that the SCOJC website had been “bombarded with abusive comments” after the video appeared online.

Meecham will be sentenced at the end of April.