SHARE
COPY LINK

ADOLF HITLER

Close shave: Hairdresser in hot water over Hitler ad

A hairdresser in Bavaria who used an image of Adolf Hitler in a campaign against right-wing extremists has fallen foul of the courts.

Close shave: Hairdresser in hot water over Hitler ad
An image of the banned campaign. Screen grab: Bayerische Rundfunk

When 28-year-old hairdresser Ursula Gresser decided to use an image of Adolf Hitler to sell her salon’s services and fight the political right wing in Germany, she didn’t think twice about it.

The innovative campaign featured posters and flyers bearing an image of the Nazi leader with a removable strip of paper above the lip which allowed readers to rip away his trademark moustache.

The accompanying wording read “Waxing gegen rechts”, roughly translated as “Wax to fight the right”.

For every customer who paid for a shave, haircut or wax, Gresser and the Boderwerk salon in the city of Cham promised to donate €1 to Exit-Deutschland, an organization that helps right-wing extremists leave the scene.

Germany has seen a rise in right-wing extremism in the wake of the refugee crisis with attacks on homes for asylum seekers on the rise and the anti-Islam platform Pegida garnering international headlines.

And on Sunday, members of the right-wing populist AfD party backed a policy paper calling for bans on minarets on mosques and the call to prayer as well as prohibitions on full-face veils for women and female headscarves in schools. 

“We wanted to show everyone what is going wrong here in Bavaria and all over Germany,” Gresser told regional daily the Mittelbayerische Zeitung.

But it didn't take long before Gresser’s plans hit a legal roadblock.

Two weeks into the campaign, prosecutors in Regensburg pulled the plug citing a clause in the German penal code which rules the use of symbols of illegal organizations.

“The reason (for the use) doesn’t matter,” chief prosecutor Theo Ziegler told regional daily the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The purpose of the law is to keep symbols of the Nazi era out of public view so that they remain taboo, he explained.

Ziegler admitted that there was a legal grey area in terms of images of Hitler. Images placed in their historical context were fine, he said. However, that was not the case for the hairdresser’s waxing ad. In fact, the advertisement could be misunderstood and it wasn’t clear from the wording that campaign was opposed to right-wing extremism.

Gresser has now removed all flyers and posters as well as deleting similar online promotional material.

As a result, she will not face charges. 

NAZIS

Austria: Newly discovered letters from Hitler’s father reveal dictator’s ‘genius complex’

Letters found stashed in an Austrian attic sent by the father of Adolf Hitler have shed light on the tyrant's upbringing.

Austria: Newly discovered letters from Hitler's father reveal dictator's 'genius complex'
Photo: Alex Halada/AFP

When he was first contacted by a woman claiming to have discovered letters written by Adolf Hitler’s father, Roman Sandgruber was understandably wary.

“Given all the forgeries and self-proclaimed ‘eyewitnesses’ who’ve come forward in the past, you think: ‘There can’t be much to it’,” the Austrian historian says.

“But then when I went down there and actually had a look at them, I realised straight away: ‘This is a sensation’.”

The original seals, the vintage postmarks, the authentic signature — left him with little doubt the letters were genuine.

Before the accidental discovery, sources about Hitler’s father Alois had been so scarce that, to Sandgruber’s knowledge, no biography of him has ever been published.

Along with other new sources, these 31 letters have helped Sandgruber write the first such volume — “Hitler’s Father: How The Son Became A Dictator” — and bring new insights into the milieu the Nazi tyrant grew up in.

The letters were written by Alois Hitler to a road maintenance official called Josef Radlegger, concerning the latter’s sale of a farmhouse in the village of Hafeld to Alois in 1895, when Adolf was six years old.

“They aren’t just letters about business, there’s a very familiar atmosphere between the two correspondents and there’s a lot of family gossip,” Sandgruber tells AFP in the University of Linz’s history library, while carefully removing the letters from the bundle they were kept in for decades.

Though Alois was known to be a “very tyrannical head of the family”, Sandgruber says the letters also offer an occasional glimpse at congeniality in his home life.

To Alois, his wife Klara was more than the “silent housewife” later described by Adolf in Mein Kampf.

One of the few people Alois had anything positive to say about, Sandgruber believes her to have been “a thoroughly emancipated woman, as we would put it today”.

“One can assume that she certainly had a say in the household,” Sandgruber notes, and particularly when it came to money matters.

“My wife… has the necessary enthusiasm and understanding for finances,” Alois writes in one of the letters.

Moreover, the letters are testament to Alois’s rise through Austrian society and his dream of becoming a country gentleman with his own farm. 

‘Genius’ complex 

The new treasure trove of documents may never have seen the light of day had pensioner Anneliese Smigielski not decided to clear-out and insulate her attic a few years ago.

She had always known that her great-great-grandfather Radlegger had sold property to Alois Hitler, and wasn’t particularly surprised to find the letters among more than 500 others, all meticulously kept in boxes.

But after a few attempts to follow Alois’s irritable messages — “he seemed to get annoyed about everything” — Smigielski found the sloping Kurrent script too hard to decode and thought it needed the attention of an expert.

Smigielski knew of Sandgruber’s previous work on the history of Upper Austria and got in touch with him in 2017, thinking he would be able to make some use of them.

While Alois is known to have made anti-Semitic statements when he himself dabbled in politics later in life, Sandgruber is wary of making too many direct connections between the father’s politics and those of his son.

He says the important influence on Adolf was the racist and anti-Semitic currents of thought which were present more generally in the Austria of his childhood.

However, Sandgruber says the one trait which undoubtedly united the two of them was “the very strong influence of being self-taught”.

“The result of that is as with the father, the son despised all those who had been through a regular school career — academics, notaries, judges, and later even military officers,” he says.

“He thinks that he alone is the genius,” Sandgruber adds.

He has been taken aback by the international attention his book from an Austrian publisher has received, garnering press coverage as far afield as Peru and China.

Smigielski herself also confesses to being a little overwhelmed by the press attention which has followed her attic discovery, saying it feels like “being a hare in the middle of the hunt”.

“But it will die down,” she says hopefully.

Perhaps not anytime soon though, such is the interest in the book that it entered its second print run just one week after publication on February 22.

SHOW COMMENTS