Madame Tussauds, the world’s most overpriced, not to say overrated, tourist attraction, is bucking popular sentiment in Germany and elsewhere by vowing to return a wax statue of Adolf Hitler to its newest museum in Berlin as soon as possible.
I posted last week about a protester who managed to rip the head off the wax statue just minutes after Madame Tussauds officially opened to the public last Saturday.
The museum tells German media that it is working quick to reattach the head, after which it will return the statue to its place in the museum, a display that showed a replica of Hitler’s underground Berlin bunker during the final days of WWII.
“Despite the incident, Madame Tussauds will again show the wax figure of Adolf Hitler in the exhibition. Madame Tussauds is apolitical and neither comments on nor judges the people shown in the exhibition or what they did in the course of their life,” the museum tells the German news magazine Der Spiegel.
The Hitler statue has generated controversy since the museum announced its initial inclusion in the Berlin museum, alongside the likes of other German speaking notables like Boris Becker, Angela Merkel and Albert Einstein.
Not only is it in bad taste to immortalize the architect of millions of deaths in wax, protesters say, but the very location of the museum on Berlin’s posh Unter den Linden, near the Brandenburg Gate, means that the small Hitler exhibit is a stone’s throw from Berlin’s three-year-old Memorial to the Murder Jews of Europe, a massive sea of gray stone less than a two block walk away.
The Hitler display at Tussauds cost about $300,000. No word yet whether the museum is planning heightened security around it when it returns.
Originally the statue was to be positioned next to a wax likeness of Winston Churchill. However, the museum decided to isolate the Hitler statue in a different area of the museum, behind both a desk and a set of ropes to keep neo Nazis from posing for pictures next to it.