Sex With Hitler

Campaigns designed to warn the public about the dangers of AIDS have not shied away from the shocking and salacious. But the latest effort in Germany to preach the gospel of safe sex is employing images of women having sex with tyrants like Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and, unbelievably, Adolf Hitler.

Three different posters have been produced, reports the blog AnimalNewYork. All the posters bear the tagline "AIDS is a mass murderer" and feature different women having sex, or about to have sex, with one of the despots. The ad agency behind the posters, Germany's Das Comitee, also produced a graphic video of a woman having sex with Hitler that appears on the campaign's website.

The website describes the posters and video as an effort to ignite dialogue: "Our campaign to mark World AIDS Day 2009 (on December 1) speaks in clear terms: The new slogan is 'AIDS is a mass murderer.' The few mass murderers who have claimed a similar number of human lives are shown: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Robert Mugabe. The campaign is designed to shake people up, to bring the topic of AIDS back to centre stage, and to reverse the trend of unprotected sexual intercourse. Because anyone can become infected."

"Every 15 seconds, another person dies of AIDS," reads a message on the site, with a ticker counting how many lives have already been taken by the disease: currently over 28 million.