For Hitler's Birthday: Five Public-Relations Disasters Involving People Wearing Nazi Uniforms

Kishidan: How not to dress for an MTV appearance.

​Happy Adolf Hitler's Birthday!! Just try celebrating, though. Wear one Nazi costume these days and you'll find yourself apologizing for weeks. Especially if you're, like, the prince of England or something.

The world is full of people who thought it was a great idea to don Nazi garb only to learn differently after photos got out.

Among them:

5. Japanese pop Group Kishidan and Sony Music
Sony Music Japan had a hot pop group called Kishidan who liked to dress bizarrely (our limited contact with Japanese pop groups would seem to indicate they all like to dress bizarrely, but we may be wrong). They were scheduled to appear on MTV Japan in a big show.

How to dress them? Like Nazis!!!! Great idea. Until the Simon Wiesenthal Center learned about it and got all huffy, as if it's any business of theirs. Sony and the group apologized profusely.

4. The mayor of a Romanian town

​Radu Mazare, the mayor of the Romanian town of Constanta, participated in a fashion parade by goose-stepping with his son, both of them wearing Nazi uniforms. He claimed later he hadn't noticed the swastika on the uniform's belt, but dude -- you were goose-stepping and your kid was wearing the distinctive German WWII helmet. In his defense, Mazare explained he had been to Israel three times and therefore wasn't an anti-Semite.