Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign accepted a $500 donation from Richard Iott, a former Republican congressional candidate whose 2010 House bid collapsed after photographs emerged showing him wearing a Nazi SS Waffen uniform — and the campaign has still said nothing about it.

Campaign finance disclosure records first reported by the Daily Mail show the donation was made on Aug. 15. Ramaswamy’s campaign has not responded to requests for comment, has issued no public statement, and has not indicated any plans to return the money.

Iott, a Monclova resident, ran as the Republican nominee in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District in 2010. His campaign unraveled when The Atlantic published photographs of him dressed in the uniform of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, a Nazi unit that fought on the Eastern Front during World War II and whose soldiers were linked to the killing of Hungarian Jews in the spring of 1945, according to historian Eleonore Lappin’s research on the death marches of Hungarian Jews through Austria.

When contacted by The Atlantic at the time, Iott confirmed his participation in the Wiking reenactment group over several years. He said his interest was historical, not ideological, but added: “I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that’s incredible.”

Historians pushed back sharply on that framing. Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., a retired history professor and author of “Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933-45,” told The Atlantic the group held “a sanitized, romanticized view of what occurred.” Sydnor noted that SS reenactments are illegal in Germany and Austria. Prof. Rob Citino of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas said: “It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend.”

Iott was defeated in November 2010 by incumbent Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur by nearly 19 points. His political donations have continued to create problems for Republican candidates. In June 2025 — two months before his donation to Ramaswamy — the Jewish publication Forward reported that Iott had also donated to Virginia Republican gubernatorial hopeful Winsome Earle-Sears.

Ramaswamy, a 40-year-old Cincinnati native, launched his gubernatorial bid in February 2025 after departing from the Department of Government Efficiency, which he had briefly co-led with Elon Musk. He holds the leading position in the Republican primary field ahead of the May 5 vote, and received an endorsement from President Donald Trump in November. A December Emerson poll showed Democrat Amy Acton, a physician and former Ohio Department of Health director, leading Ramaswamy by one point, within the survey’s margin of error.

The Ramaswamy campaign had not responded to multiple requests for comment as of publication.