Adolf Hitler has cruised to his fifth straight election victory in Namibia but the politician will now be adjusting his shocking name, despite claiming he grew up seeing it as ‘totally normal’
Adolf Hitler, a Namibian politician named after the German Führer, has vowed to change his name after winning a fifth term in office, claiming his father “probably didn’t understand” what his namesake stood for.
The 59-year-old said he would keeping his first name but drop his surname, reports GB News. In his fifth straight election victory over his 30-year career as a district administrator, he said: “I am Adolf Uunona”.
Mr Uunona said he planned to rename himself to end “associations with someone I do not even know”. Germanic first names are common in Namibia, as the country was once part of German South West Africa, from 1884 to 1915. Mr Uunona told German newspaper Bild: “As a child I saw it as a totally normal name”.
His father, he said, “probably didn’t understand what Adolf Hitler stood for” when picking his son’s name. Namibia also has several Germanic town names such as Swakopmund, Lüderitz and its capital city of Windhoek.
“It wasn’t until I was growing up that I realised: This man wanted to subjugate the whole world,” said Mr Uunona. “I have nothing to do with any of these things.”
The Namibian politician has represented the small constituency of Ompundja since 2004.
In 1966, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) launched an armed struggle against South African occupation and has been the ruling party of the country since Namibia’s independence in 1990.
Mr Uunona, who represents Swapo in the Oshana Regional Council, is fed up of answering questions about his links with his namesake.
“The fact I have this name does not mean I want to conquer Oshana,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I’m striving for world domination.”
Mr Uunona won almost every vote in the constituency in his first election, missing out on just 11 of the 1,697 votes. In 2020, he won re-election by a margin of just under 1,000 votes.
The following year, Germany and Namibia announced an agreement where Germany recognised as genocide its killing of members of the Herero and Nama communities between 1904 and 1908.
More than €1billion was pledged by Germany over 30 years in development funding, but the country did not formally pay reparations. In 2020, bilateral aid from Germany to Namibia was worth €45.16million.
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