Hitler’s Steamy PSA Causes Outrage

A man and a woman enter an apartment, passionately kissing and stripping. They move to the bed. What kind of ad is this?

In the last seconds the man looks up: It’s Adolf Hitler with a clenched smile. The tagline hits the screen: “AIDS is a mass murderer.”

This new campaign has sparked outrage in Germany, where it is planned to run on TV and in movie theaters. The ads were commissioned by the awareness group Regenbogen, “Rainbow” in German, to “shake people up, to bring the topic of AIDS back to center stage, and to reverse the trend of unprotected sexual intercourse,” according to their website.

“It is disgusting and we’re asking the producers of the campaign to pull it back,” Joerg Litwinschuh of German AIDS Assistance, another awareness group, told the Associated Press.

While the campaign was originally supposed to run throughout German media, Regenbogen spokesman Jan Schwertner has reportedly said nothing was final. Many AIDS charities and Jewish organizations were outraged that this might even be considered for TV.

Many AIDS groups are concerned that the image of Hitler, just one of three in the campaign also featuring Stalin and Hussein, will only stigmatize those with HIV and AIDS more.

“In addition to not promoting any HIV prevention behavior, is that it reaffirms the misconception that evil people spread HIV and that you can some how tell who’s at risk or is infected,” says Carl Latkin, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

The videos were made to mark World AIDS Day n December 1st, 2009.

The nonprofit Regenbogen argues that public interest in AIDS has massively declined, despite a death toll of more than 28 million people, with 5,000 victims added every day. Often thought of a problem plaguing Africa, HIV infection is actually on the rise in many countries, including Germany and the U.S.

In Germany there were 2,718 new reported cases of HIV in 2006, up 11 percent from 2005. The U.S. has also seen increases in rates of HIV infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 56,000 Americans contract the virus each year, with disproportionate amount of cases among black men who have sex with men and black heterosexual women. If the shocking campaign reaches even some of these high-risk populations, Regenbogen is happy.

“You can’t satisfy everybody,” the group’s deputy head, Heiko Schoessling, told the Associated Press on Monday. “But we’re happy with the overwhelming response to our campaign. That’s exactly what we wanted to achieve.”

Are you offended by this ad, or do you think it’s appropriate and effective?

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