Mercedes Angry at Hitler Run-Over Video

By Anne Cohen August 28, 2013

Mercedes is less than pleased with a student-filmed phony advertisement depicting a young Hitler getting run over by a C-Class luxury sedan.

The video, filmed and released by German film school students for a competition sponsored in part by Mercedes-Benz, shows the car meandering around an Austrian village — Hitler’s hometown. We see the car break for two little blond girls who scatter out of the way before the engine revs up again, and the vehicle plows into young Adolf playing further down the road.

The image of adult Hitler (what could have been) flashes for a split-second upon impact, while the boy’s mother screams his name. “Detects dangers before they come up,” the end tag declares.

According to the Huffington Post, Mercedes spokesman Tobias Mueller, called the content “inappropriate,” and added that the company’s lawyers ordered the students to include a disclaimer noting that their video has absolutely no relation to their brand.

Asked about their project by the Independent, film students Tobias Haase, Jan Mettler, Lydia Lohse and Gun Aydemir replied: “Mercedes sells its cars on smart technology which prevents accidents. We wanted to pose the question of what might happen if technology had a soul.”

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO