It has been 67 years since a young tree wrapped in a swastika was planted in honour of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and it has grown into a sturdy oak that casts its shadow over a tiny Polish village. Now the mayor wants the tree axed — because it knows too much.

The Nazis had a thing about trees, perhaps because of their curiosity about ancient Teutonic tree-worship or perhaps because they wanted to shape nature to their will.

Herman Goering, the Reich’s supreme forester, apart from running the Luftwaffe, also paid attention to trees. One issue was how to protect a tree exactly on the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia. This was resolved when Germany invaded. One Nazi-sympathising forester planted a sylvan swastika in a pine forest. It was visible only from the air, and only during autumn and winter, but it was seen as a modest tribute to the Führer every time he flew over the woodland of Brandenburg.

The most important tree ritual of all was the Hitler birthday planting on April 20. The southern Polish village of Jaslo was one of several hundred communities to be given a tiny oak from the Führer’s plantation, near his birthplace in Branau am Inn.

The ritual was always the same: a brass band and a speech by the German-imposed mayor that would always invoke the metaphor of deep roots, of tiny acorns turning into great oaks, of 1,000-year Reichs. Attendance was compulsory.

Kazimierz Polak, 81, a local historian from Jaslo, watched the ceremony all those years ago with two friends. “It was part of an effort to make Jaslo German,” he said. Two years later, with the Red Army moving westwards, the Germans burnt down most of the 1,200 homes. Only 39 houses — and the tree — were left intact.

Maria Kurowska, the Mayor of Jaslo, now wants the tree to be chopped down. It is bad for the village’s image, she says, and is standing in the way of a potential traffic roundabout. “It’s only a tree,” she says,” and we have hundreds of them here.

“So here is the choice: I can improve our town’s traffic system by cutting it down or I can allow it to stay as a memorial to that criminal. I think the choice is rather straightforward. After all, we can plant trees in honour of Hitler’s victims.”

Mr Polak is leading the “save Hitler’s tree” movement. The oak, he says, has been a silent witness to some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. “It is a historic curiosity. What is the oak really guilty of? It’s not the tree’s fault that it was planted here to honour the biggest criminal and enemy of Poland.” The tree, in other words, was merely obeying orders.

The debate is splitting the village of 38,000 people down the middle. Some suggest, in e-mails to the mayor, that it should simply be rededicated to Holocaust victims. “The tree is not a Nazi, leave it alone,” says one of the conservationists. “It is growing healthy and tall, let it grow,” says Mr Polak.

The debate has even reached Israel, where commentators on the Haaretz website have suggested that Hitler has at least made a small contribution to controlling climate change. Another commentator said that it should undergo a similar fate to Hitler’s human victims: “This tree should be cut, put on a train and incinerated.”

Symbols of hate

• On July 5, 2008, a man ripped the head off a wax sculpture of Hitler at the opening of the Madame Tussauds museum in Berlin. The headless statue was replaced and remains on display

• Between September and November 2002, a kneeling, life-sized Hitler statue entitled Him, looking upward and with its hands folded in prayer, caused mixed reactions at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. The sculpture was made by the Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan

• Barclays’ eagle emblem, left, which had stood on top of one of its big buildings, Barclays House in Poole, Dorset, for 30 years, had to be removed in 2007 from its 117-ft high perch after reports that it looked like a Nazi symbol.

Source: Times archives

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end