Blog 4_Hitler: a new spokesman for AIDS-awareness campaign?

A controversial AIDS-awareness advertisement was released last Wednesday on German TV, featuring the face of the notorious German dictator, Adolf Hitler.

The 40-second long advertisement is a part of the AIDS-awareness campaign from a German AIDS lobby group, Rainbow. The provocative video features a couple having passionate sex in a room. Lastly the identity of the man was revealed and it was Adolf Hitler. The slogan of the campaign, "AIDS is a mass murderer", then emerges. The campaign also includes posters with images of Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. (See below)

The message of the ad is strong, but maybe too strong. The ad has sparked world-wide discussions, especially among AIDS organisations. YouTube has also removed the clip “due to terms of use violation”, without giving any more specific details.

In an interview with CNN, Jörg Litwinschuh, spokesman of Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe, calls the ad "sensationalist" and "counter-productive". Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe is one of the biggest AIDS organisations in Germany and an umbrella group for HIV counselling centres.

Many other AIDS organisations have also demanded the campaign to be pulled off because the ad suggests that victims of HIV/AIDS are perpetrators and are comparable to villains such as Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein.

Mark Cloutier, CEO of the AIDS foundation in San Francisco, also believes that the ad is destructive and sends out the wrong message.

"We don't want to say that people who have HIV are mass murderers." Cloutier said in an CNN interview.

He also criticises the lack of preventive information in the ad. He suggests that positive messages, such as encouraging the use of condoms, should be applied instead.

CEO of Das Comitee, the agency responsible for the aired ad, Dirk Silz, confesses that the responses have been more overwhelming than the agency expected, with more than 40 000 messages received a day.

However, despite all the disapprovals, both Rainbow and Das Comitee insist that the message has to be put across.

"We want to give the virus a face, and it cannot be a beautiful face." Silz said.

Jan Schwertner, spokesman for Rainbow, tells TIME, that the ad deliberately wants to provoke people, especially young Germans, to remind them of the usage of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV.

But does the frenzy of "Hitler has sex" catch the attention of young Germans, as both Schwertner and Silz intended?

"I think the campaign is lovely, though rather childish." said Salomon Theinert, a 20-year-old international politics and history student from Constance, Germany. "If someone needs a face for AIDS, they should put the face of an AIDS-infected person breathing in his/her last minutes, that would be more effective."

Jakob Uecker, a 21-year-old German from Bremen, is also sceptical about the effectiveness of the ad. " I think people are generally aware that AIDS is dangerous and you should protect yourself [...] so I'm not sure what good that [the ad] will do."

The full and uncensored version of the ad can be found on the campaign's official Web site at www.aids-is-a-mass-murderer.com.