A man has torn the wax head off an effigy of Adolf Hitler in Berlin, just minutes after a new branch of the Madame Tussaud's waxwork-museum chain opened for the first time to the public. German police said they detained the 41-year-old man after today's incident.

He had crossed a rope barrier and touched the figure, and another member of the public tried to pull him away, with the head coming away in the melee.

Police said the detained man, from the nearby leftist neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, appeared to have been opposed to the inclusion of the Nazi dictator in the 75-figure show.

The decision by London-based Tussaud's, part of the Merlin Entertainments company, to include Hitler in the show, at an address on Berlin's grandest street, Unter den Linden, has roused fierce passions in the German capital.

Responding to warnings that it might become a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, Tussaud's depicted Hitler as a broken man in his bunker just before his 1945 defeat and death.

There are eight Tussaud's museums round the world. The other European shows are in London and Amsterdam.

Today's opening was extensively reported in the German media.

While Hitler has been shown in German school textbooks, television history shows and feature films like Downfall in 2004, critics said the Tussaud's show was using him for entertainment.

The newspaper Bild reported today that another subject of a Tussaud's effigy, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, was seeking legal advice about his own inclusion in the show. Tussaud's had approached him and he had set certain conditions, but they were not met.

"I never gave permission," he was quoted as saying.