A junior at Brooklyn's Leon M. Goldstein High School caused a fuss Tuesday when he arrived at school dressed as Adolf Hitler for Halloween. School administrators demanded he take off his beige coat decorated with a swastika armband, telling him he would have to spend the day in detention if he failed to do so.

But 16-year-old Walter Petryk, who went so far as growing a mustache to complete his get-up, refused. He said his costume was a satire of Hitler and was protected by his right to freedom of expression.

"I figured somebody would say something eventually, but I really do believe that people have the right to express themselves," Petryk, an aspiring comedy writer, tells the New York Post.

Petryk says the school dean, Paul Puglia, pulled him out of his second-period English class.

Petryk tells the paper Puglia said, "Excuse me, fuhrer, can I talk to you for a minute?" and then asked, "Are you out of your mind, you idiot?" He then allegedly ordered him into the office, telling him, "Consider yourself my prisoner of war."

Petryk's stepfather, Harold Bloom, is Jewish and lost relatives during WWII. He says that at first he was "very disturbed" by the costume choice, but he defends his stepson's rights.

"If he had wanted to advocate my genocide, I wouldn't have allowed [the costume]", Bloom says. "That wasn't the spirit in which he was doing this at all. He was doing it in the spirit of Monty Python and Mel Brooks."

Petryk's mother, Diane Petryk-Bloom, picked her son up at school.

"This is a matter of artistic free expression and a school not being stupid. [The dean] is offended by a parody of Hitler - and he's acting like Hitler," she says.