Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Hitler Lookalike Busted In Fuhrer’s Hometown

Austrian police have detained a man for glorifying the Nazi regime, after he appeared in public dressed as Adolf Hitler, a police spokesman said.

The 25-year-old was arrested on Monday night in Braunau am Inn, Hitler’s birthplace, the spokesman said.

The daily newspaper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten said on Saturday the man had been seen outside the house in which Hitler was born and in a local bookstore browsing through magazines about World War II.

He had a Hitler-style mustache and similar haircut to the dictator’s, and wore “a suit reminiscent of Hitler,” the paper said, adding that he identified himself in a local bar as “Harald Hitler.”

“It is definitely not a carnival joke or an art project, the young man knows exactly what he is doing,” the police spokesman said.

Hitler, born in 1889, led Nazi Germany into World War II and the Holocaust. Glorifying Hitler or the Nazis is a crime in Austria, which Nazi Germany annexed in 1938.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.