Unemployed German fined 900 euros for beheading Adolf Hitler waxwork

New Delhi, May 13 (ANI): A court in Germany has fined an unemployed man 900 euros after he knocked off the head of a waxwork figure of Adolf Hitler in a Berlin museum.

The incident happened just minutes after the opening of the Madame Tussauds museum took place in the German capital in July, reports the China Daily.

The 42-year-old man, who is an ex-policeman, pushed past security staff and ripped off the head, as he found the figure of the Nazi leader inappropriate to be displayed only 500 meters from Berlin's Holocaust memorial.

The waxwork of a glum-looking Hitler in a mock bunker had stirred debate in Germany even before it went on display.

And critics argued it was tasteless to display a replica of the man who unleashed World War Two and ordered the extermination of Europe's Jews.

Madame Tussauds said that the museum avoided politics, arguing Hitler stood for a significant part of German history and his waxwork, therefore, had a legitimate part in the exhibition.

The restored figure was returned to the museum in September, and is now displayed behind a glass wall.

About 25 workers spent about four months on the original waxwork, using more than 2,000 pictures and pieces of archive material and also guided by a model of the "Fuehrer" in the London branch of Madame Tussauds.

The wax figure has been cited as the latest in a gradual breaking down of taboos about Hitler in Germany more than 60 years after the end of the war and the Holocaust in which some six million Jews were killed. (ANI)