![]() ![]() On Bangkok’s Khao San Road, a backpacker haven, other T-shirt designs boast images of Hitler, including Photoshopped prints of the Fuhrer sunbathing naked on a tropical beach.Ī collection of cartoonish T-shirt designs with Hitler’s image on sale in Bangkok “Hitler shirts are very popular, especially with teenage boys,” notes the shop’s 30-year-old owner, whose family operates a clothing factory. Panda Adolf takes pride of place among impressionistic Smurfs, pop stars and Japanese manga characters. Hut’s McHitler doll now has its face covered with a Lucha Libre wrestler’s mask.Īcross town at another fashion mall, another small shop hawks its own cutesy caricatures of Hitler plastered on T-shirts. “I said to him, “I don’t mind the doll just take the face off,’” he says. “It hurts the feelings of every Jew and every civilized person.” “You don’t want to see memories of the Nazi period trivialized in this manner,” stresses Ambassador Itzhak Shoham, whose embassy is right behind Terminal 21. Israel’s ambassador in Bangkok isn’t amused. ![]() “But he looks funny and the shirts are very popular with young people.”įollowing a popular vote organized by a youth streetwear magazine last year, Hut’s clothing label was named one of Thailand’s Top 5 T-shirt brands. “It’s not that I like Hitler,” Hut insists. Thais shoppers, including soap opera starlets and other young celebrities, love posing gleefully with it. Outside his shop stands a large dummy of Hitler as Ronald with its motorized left arm going up and down in the Nazi salute. He does brisk business selling his T-shirts, including his trademark McHitler designs alongside his caricatures of Michael Jackson, Che Guevera and Kim Jong-Il. They come to my shop and complain,” laments the owner of Seven Star, a small clothing shop at Terminal 21, a new designer mall in central Bangkok.Ī thirtyish fellow who identifies himself only by his nickname as “Hut,” he is a graduate of a local university’s arts program. Panda Adolf’s manlier doppelganger sports a sickly brown Stormtrooper uniform. Adolf McDonald’s partner is a transvestite with fuchsia hair, lipstick, long lashes and a timid Mona Lisa smile. Some shirts, which cost from 200 baht to 370 baht ($7 to $12) apiece, come in matching outfits for couples. He pouts petulantly like a spoiled brat as he flashes the Nazi salute. On yet another he appears as a pink Teletubby with doe eyes, jug ears and a pink swastika for an antenna. On another T-shirt the Fuhrer is shown in a lovely panda costume with a Nazi armband. ![]() In one popular T-shirt design Hitler is transformed into a cartoonish Ronald McDonald, the fast-food chain’s clown mascot, sporting a bouffant cherry-red hairdo and a stern look. In Bangkok’s latest outbreak of Nazi chic, these popular icons have all metamorphosed into cutesy alter egos of the Fuhrer, who seems to exert a childlike fascination over many young Thais. A young woman poses for her boyfriend with the trademark dummy of Seven Star, a shop at a high-end mall in Bangkok which sells popular caricatures of Adolf Hitler on T-shirts, jackets and cigarette boxes (photos: Tibor Krausz) ![]()
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