BONN -- Germany's media on Thursday cringed at America's worst school shooting, saying Adolf Hitler was still causing suffering and ruin decades after his death.
"Hitler's murderous children," splashed Germany's Bild newspaper, reporting the links between the Nazi leader and teenage gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who shot themselves after taking the lives of 13 others in Littleton, Colo., on Tuesday."Adolf Hitler, this horrific dictator, is still causing suffering and ruin decades after his death," the paper said.
The two teenage boys belonged to an outcast group called the "Trenchcoat Mafia," so named because of their long black coats reminiscent of the Nazis' feared Gestapo secret police. Their talk was of guns, violence and their hero, Hitler.
"Eric and Dylan, the neo-Nazis: when they met in the garage they spoke German. They worshipped Adolf Hitler like a rock star," noted the Bonn Express tabloid in disgust.
It was not lost on press commentaries that the day of the massacre, April 20, would have been Hitler's 110th birthday.
The fact that the day passed off quietly in Germany itself, meanwhile, was not wholly accidental.
Strictly enforced laws ban the display of all Nazi paraphernalia in Germany. The two Americans would have been hauled before the authorities merely for giving the Hitler salute, let alone for wearing Nazi insignias.
"The American ideal of freedom of speech and thought meant no one took any notice of the boys wearing the Nazi swastika and listening to neo-Nazi bands," noted one German TV correspondent reporting from the school on state television.