Oliver Masucci, the actor who plays Hitler in satirical film Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who's Back), told ARD news on Monday that Germany must be careful to safeguard its democracy after a barrage of far-right comments from ordinary people.

With director David Wnendt, Masucci travelled around the country by car for a month, interacting with ordinary people while dressed as the Nazi leader and filming the results with two cameras.

"They forgot relatively quickly that the two cameras were running and began to pour their hearts out to this man, to say what was really on their minds," Masucci told ARD public television.

"And then shortly afterwards we saw that in the Pegida movement, that didn't surprise us that they suddenly went into the streets. Because this middle-class that's swinging to the right, we'd already seen all that on camera."

But the phenomenon was far from restricted to Dresden or the former communist east German states, Wnendt told ARD.

Rather than insulting Hitler or confronting him, people seemed happy to see and chat with the man behind history's most infamous genocide.

"By the end of our filming, our questions had totally changed. How can it be that so many people react so positively to Hitler, accept him like that?" he asked.

bbabo.Net