Location, Location, Location

BERLIN (Reuters) - An artist who depicted Adolf Hitler as a pop art-style cartoon figure at an exhibition near the former Dachau concentration camp said Thursday he would close the 2-week-old show due to public outrage.

Walter Gaudnek said his brightly colored artworks aimed to provoke people by showing Hitler as a human rather than a monster, but Jewish community and local political leaders see the images as dangerous.

"I wanted to educate my students on the historical phenomenon of Hitler and show an aspect of him which has got lost over time," he told Reuters after his paintings were printed in a Munich newspaper.

"People forget why millions of Germans were fooled by Hitler ... but I painted a picture of him with his dog because he was once this figure in the past," said Gaudnek, an American who was born in Germany.

The bold, oversized drawings show clusters of figures and swastika flags. In one, Hitler is seen speaking from a podium flanked by Nazi guards, while a girl with long blond braids listens intently.

Gaudnek's art is on show at his small private gallery 15 miles from the Dachau concentration camp memorial in southern Germany where 32,000 people were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The exhibition consists of 12 paintings and 24 prints, either showing a uniformed Hitler or other Nazi iconography.

Gaudnek, an arts professor, said he was surprised by the reaction. "I'm starting to take the pictures down today because of the criticism," he said.

Charlotte Knobloch, vice president of Germany's central Jewish Council, told Munich's Abendzeitung newspaper: "There are plenty of ways of engaging with history. We could do without pictures of this monster without any problems."





Hitler "should not be portrayed as he is in this show."

Knobloch added there seemed to be a dangerous fashion for films and exhibitions focusing on Hitler as an individual.

A controversial German film tracking Hitler's last days in his bunker in Berlin, "The Downfall," was one of the country's most popular films earlier this year. It depicts Hitler as an ordinary man, eating dinner and playing with children.

"These portrayals can be misinterpreted. The perpetrator can appear the victim," Knobloch said.

It is illegal in Germany to display artwork glorifying Hitler.