Berlin - A man tore the wax head off an effigy of Adolf Hitler in Berlin on Saturday, just minutes after a new branch of the Madame Tussaud's waxwork-museum chain had opened for the first time to the public. German police said the man, 41, had crossed a rope barrier to attack the waxwork. Two security guards intervened and there was a melee. One of the staffers suffered an injury to the leg. Police were called and arrested the man.
A Tussaud's spokeswoman, Natalie Ruoss, voiced surprise that the guards could not stop him.
She said the headless figure was removed from the exhibition, but she did not know yet if it could be repaired. "That depends on how much damage it suffered. It cost about 200,000 euros (about 300,000 dollars) to make," she said.
The detained man, from the nearby leftist neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, said he opposed the inclusion of the Nazi dictator in the 75-figure show, according to police.
A tourist said the "ordinary looking" man had been second in a queue that waited one hour for the attraction to open its doors.
"There was no warning about what was going to happen. The man went calmly up to Hitler, pulled the head off and called out, 'Never again war'," the other visitor told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The decision by London-based Tussaud's, part of the Merlin Entertainments company, to include Hitler in the show, at an address on Berlin's grandest street, Unter den Linden, has roused fierce passions in the German capital.
Responding to warnings that Berlin's latest tourist draw might become a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, Tussaud's depicted Hitler as a broken man in his bunker just before his 1945 defeat and death.
There are eight Tussaud's museums round the world. The other European shows are in London and Amsterdam.
The Saturday opening was extensively reported in the media in Germany, where people still tense up whenever Hitler is mentioned.
While Hitler has been shown in German school textbooks, television history shows and feature films like Downfall in 2004 without protest, critics said Tussaud's was using him for entertainment.
The newspaper Bild reported Saturday that another subject of a Tussaud's effigy, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, was seeking legal advice about his own inclusion in the show. Tussaud's had approached him and he had set certain conditions, but they were not met.
"I never gave permission," he was quoted saying.
