A waxwork model of Adolf Hitler was beheaded by a protester today in Berlin minutes after the controversial exhibit was unveiled.

Just after the opening of the new branch of Madame Tussauds museum in the German capital, a 41-year-old German man pushed aside two security men guarding the exhibit and wrenched the model’s head off.

The protester did not resist arrest when police arrived shortly afterwards and he is being investigated for assault and damaging property.

Critics have attacked the waxwork figure of a glum-looking Adolf Hitler in a mock bunker during the last days of his life as being in bad taste.

It is illegal in Germany to show Nazi symbols and art glorifying Hitler and commentators have said it is inappropriate to display the Nazi dictator alongside celebrities, pop stars, world statesmen and sporting heroes.

Institutions such as the foundation for Germany’s central Holocaust memorial site condemned the idea of the exhibit as tasteless, saying it had been included simply as a commercial stunt. The wax figure is the latest in a gradual breaking down of taboos about Hitler in Germany more than 60 years after the end of the war and the Holocaust in which some six million Jews, and other groups, were killed.

It took around 25 workers four months to make the waxwork, using more than 2,000 pictures and pieces of archive material. They were also guided by a model of the “Fuehrer” in the London branch of Madame Tussauds.

Unobtrusive signs near the exhibit asked visitors to refrain from taking photos or posing with Hitler “out of respect for the millions of people who died during World War Two”.

Camera surveillance and museum officials were meant to stop inappropriate behaviour.

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