1250 Heil Hitler saluting garden gnomes dominate German town center

October 11th, 2009 STUTTGART - German luxury carmaker Porsche is to take a critical look at forced labour carried out in its factories under Nazi rule, the company said Sunday. Suggestions that hundreds of people were forced to work at Porsche for little or no pay are to be investigated by external experts, the company's head archivist told Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

October 5th, 2009 LONDON - Keen to ensure British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was fully aware of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler in 1938, Britain's intelligence agencies told him that the German leader called him an arsehole", says a new book. Britain's domestic security service MI5 was desperate to draw the attention of Chamberlain to its 1938 assessment that Hitler was in the early stages of a massive programme of territorial expansion.

September 30th, 2009 LONDON - A former Schutzstaffel (SS) man has rejected conspiracy theories surrounding Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's escape from a reported suicide attempt in 1945, saying that he saw Hitler's dead body on April 30 of that year has never forgotten the sight. Rochus Misch statement follows a claim made by an American expert that Hitler's supposed skull, which Russia has claimed since 1946, actually belonged to a woman.

September 8th, 2009 Safe-sex ad featuring Hitler stirs German angerBERLIN — A German AIDS awareness group has come under fire for posting an online video that starts off with a young couple having sex in an apartment before revealing the male to be a grinning Adolf Hitler. Its closing message: "AIDS is a mass murderer." On Tuesday, a prominent German Jewish group and AIDS prevention advocates demanded the ad be withdrawn.

August 13th, 2009 German court rules on display of Nazi symbolsBERLIN — A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that people can be prosecuted for displaying Nazi slogans in Germany only if they are in the German language. The Federal Court of Justice overturned a lower court's ruling convicting a neo-Nazi of transporting a shipment of 100 T-shirts with the slogan, "Blood and Honour," written in English.

July 27th, 2009 BERLIN - Descendants of famous German composer Richard Wagner have decided to reveal their family's proximity to Adolf Hitler. The two great-granddaughters of Wagner, who held their first Bayreuth Festival this weekend, have promised to reveal whether their grandmother, Winifred Wagner, slept with Hitler, the Times Online reports.

July 20th, 2009 LONDON - Henry Ford's automobile production techniques did not only revolutionize the car industry, but his methods and beliefs also had a huge effect on the infamous Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, a new book has revealed. In 1920, Hitler's staff was astonished to see Ford's portrait hanging at the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich.

July 17th, 2009 LONDON - German prosecutors have launched an investigation into whether a garden gnome with its right arm raised in a Heil Hitler salute breaks the law. According to The Times, the golden gnome has gone on display at an art gallery in Nuremberg, the Bavarian city that hosted huge Nazi party rallies before the Second World War and the major war crimes trials afterwards.alter Traeg, a spokesman for the Nuremberg public prosecutors office, said that investigators had to ascertain whether the gnome breached post-War laws banning Hitler salutes and other Nazi symbols.

July 8th, 2009 LONDON - A Polish town is all set to cut down a towering oak tree that had been planted to mark Adolf Hitler's birthday during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. The authorities in Jaslo want to cut down the tree, and burn it to make way for a new roundabout.

June 23rd, 2009 LONDON - A Polish town is all set to cut down a towering oak tree that had been planted as a gift from Adolf Hitler, during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. The authorities in Jaslo want to cut down the tree, and burn it to make way for a new roundabout, But some residents have come to the defence of the 40-foot oak, and are lobbying to save it.The tree has not hurt anyone and is not guilty of anything," the Telegraph quoted Kazimierz Polak as saying.

May 13th, 2009 ROME - The Vatican has involved itself in a fresh public relations fiasco for seeking to rewrite the biography of Pope Benedict XVI by denying that he was ever a member of the Hitler Youth. Even though the 82-year-old German pontiff has admitted in numerous interviews that he was drafted unwillingly into the Nazi youth movement towards the end of the war, his spokesman came up with another version.

May 12th, 2009 Man fined for beheading wax HitlerBERLIN — A Berlin court has fined a 42-year-old man $1,220 (euro900) for beheading a wax figure of Adolf Hitler at the Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds. A Berlin district court convicted Frank Lachner of property damage and bodily harm for lightly injuring a security guard on July 5 when he jumped over a desk behind which the Hitler figure was seated and knocked off its head in what he said at the time was an act of protest.

May 10th, 2009 LONDON - A self-portrait by Adolf Hitler, which sold at an auction for 10,000 pounds - ten times its reserve price, is now being denounced as fake. When the painting, signed "A.

April 26th, 2009 'Producers' co-author has old memories of BerlinAs a Berlin theater prepared to open its production of "The Producers," Mel Brooks, the actor, comedian and director behind the show, reminisced to The Associated Press about past visits to Germany and reflected on the symbolism of playing the Third Reich for laughs in the German capital. Brooks, 82, was a U.S.

April 10th, 2009 BERLIN - Germany is to stage the controversial Mel Brooks musical "The Producers" for the first time amid a debate over whether the country is ready to laugh at its Nazi past. According to The Telegraph, the show, which opens in May, is being staged at the theatre where Hitler once watched a wartime version of The 'Merry Widow' Berlin's Admiralspalast Theatre is putting on the first-ever production of the show that features tap-dancing storm troopers and jokes about the invasion of Poland.