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Bernie: Hitler wasn’t all bad

F1 commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone has courted more controversy over remarks he made about Adolf Hitler during an interview with the Times.

Ecclestone referred to Hitler as ”able to get things done,” a comment which has provoked anger and fury from relatives of the victims of the most notorious dictator in history.

Mr Ecclestone said: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done.

“In the end he got lost, so he wasn t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn t a dictator.” He also rounded on democracy, claiming that “it hasn t done a lot of good for many countries — including this one [Britain]”.

The 78-year-old was referrring to the row between FOTA and Max Mosley, in which the former accused the latter of being a dictator. Ecclestone’s comments -which defend dictatorship – are clearly meant as a defence of Mosley’s style, but he must have known the controversy they would cause.

Ecclestone did not anticipate the media firestorm that his remarks would cause, with his and Mosley’s leadership of the sport already under heavy criticism. The comments bring yet more bad press onto Mosley’s shoulders. The FIA President’s father was leader of the British fascists in the 1930s.

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