GERMANY:IF ADOLF HITLER had had bodyguards like the two assigned to his likeness in Berlin's new Madame Tussaud's, history might have turned out very differently, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
Moments after the new German branch of the famous wax museum opened its doors on Saturday morning, a visitor pounced on the uniformed effigy of the dictator and ripped off his head.
With his successful attack, a 41-year-old unemployed former police officer, identified only as Frank L, succeeded where 42 others before him, including Count von Stauffenberg, had failed.
The Führer's second downfall began on Friday evening in a Berlin pub, where Frank and his friends agreed that putting Hitler in a wax museum was unacceptable.
"I said that I would do something about it," he said yesterday. "My friends said I hadn't the nerve, so a bet was made." After hours of heavy drinking, Frank made his way into the city centre.
"I walked up and down Unter den Linden for hours and thought about what I would do, then I had the idea of ripping off the head," he said. "Then I joined the queue. While I waited I started to get nervous but I decided to see the thing through."
At 9am he was second in the queue at the new Madame Tussaud's, a stone's throw from the Brandenburg Gate and the infamous Führerbunker.
When the doors opened, Frank made a bee-line for Hitler, sitting behind a desk with just a few books for company. Security cameras were trained on the scene. An incongruous plaque, to placate pre-opening protesters, asked visitors not to take pictures of the figure "out of respect for the millions of people who died in the second World War".
Two security men were posted on either side of the bunker scene, but they were too slow for Frank, who as a police officer was used to running street battles during Berlin's notorious May Day riots.
He cleared the desk and, with a shout of "No more war!", beheaded Austria's most famous failed painter with a flourish worthy of the French Revolution.
It was an unexpected twist to the controversy surrounding Madame Tussaud's: dozens of public figures in Germany said it was "tasteless" to turn the dictator into a tourist attraction.
The museum said yesterday it was unclear whether the €200,000 attraction would rise again. One visitor yesterday, about to pay €16 for a ticket, said: "Perhaps the exhibition will be cheaper now without the main attraction."