It's not true anymore, though.
Uunona has officially changed his name and also his papers have been updated by now.
His name is now just Adolf Uunona.
Source: German Spiegel magazine.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
219 points (94.0% liked)
World News
50976 readers
2231 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
- Blogsites are treated in the same manner as social media sites. Medium, Blogger, Substack, etc. are not valid news links regardless of who is posting them. Yes, legitimate news sites use Blogging platforms, they also use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and we don't allow those links either.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
A wild twist on the Uuno movies
I’m glad they included a picture in case we forgot who hitler was.
Well, his father did, so...
He looks different than I remember....can't put my finger on it though...
No mustache
Nah. Hitler was only captured in black and white photography. The other one is colored so it can't be him.
More common than you might think. When I lived in a remote Amazonian village in the early 2000s, a local teacher was named Hitler (his given name). This area probably barely had contact with the capital in the 50s, let alone Europe. It wasn't uncommon to choose a powerful or famous name, and Hitler was probably just someone who they knew changed the world.
There were other interesting names still being given too. My favorite was a baby named Shakira Marley while I lived there.
In his book, Trevor Noah mentions this. Everyone knows the name Hitler! So it's like borrowing fame.
Across West Africa a few years post-9/11, tons of merch would feature Osama Bin Ladin. T-shirts, watches, posters, etc. Most people didn't fully understand he did 9/11, but his name and picture was always in Western media, so he was famous!
That's kinda cute in a strange way.
It's literally free fame.
Would you have ever heard of this local African politician if he didn't have this name?
Given that the headline doesn't even mention which country, no.
Literally Hitler.
Also hes 59...so he's born in 1966-ish. Hitler was recent history. That'd be like me calling my kid Suddam Hussein.
Oh really was there someone else by that name already? I hadn't known.
You'd think at least a nurse or something would be like "uhh you might want to reconsider".
I'm certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article
But a couple things jumping out at me
The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)
They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.
And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn't exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there's a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don't quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it's not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don't get why so many people in the West are mad about it.
So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here
It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.
Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn't fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it
Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a "haha, how do you like your leader's name when it's on a black kid? Suck it Nazis."
Or maybe it was something else. That's just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.
*fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.
Robert A. Heinlein was good friends with L Ron Hubbard — you may want to rethink your assertion that Musk is 'stealing' the word. Pretty sure that ship sailed long before Musk.
In the same interview with the German paper, Uunona said his father gave him the name without understanding its dark history.
“As a child I saw it as a totally normal name,” Uunona said.
Uunona insisted he rejects Nazi ideology and any dreams of world domination.
“It wasn’t until I was growing up that I realised: This man wanted to subjugate the whole world,” Uunona said. “I have nothing to do with any of these things.”
Idk, I guess I believe the guy, but his father must have been living under a rock.
Africa is not known for being well plugged in. Especially not in the 1960's.
That'd be like me calling my kid Suddam Hussein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_Vinladen
Vinladen is named after Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaeda […] His brother is named Sadam Huseín after the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his father planned to name the third sibling George Bush after U.S. president George W. Bush if it had been a boy.
Yeah, but this was colonial/early postcolonial Africa, and Hitler was in Europe. How well can you tell fine African leaders from atrocity committing ones? And, the average Lemming has an actual solid education.
This is the dudes explanation as well, when the media bothers him. Dad just picked a random major European leader.
There is actually an Indian colleague in IT by the name that you have mentioned :)
Oh shit does he work for Cisco TAC? I think I've worked with him before. Forgot all about that.
Nah. Kinda similar big name, but I'd rather not name the company.
I definitely recall talking to someone at Cisco TAC (or maybe Fortinet...but most of my dealings with FortiTAC lately are with the same groups of people...you get to a point in understanding the tech that only certain people can help you...) who has a "villainous" middle-eastern name.
There's likely more than one though.
The name/s Adolf/Adolphe are still in use in German and French former colonies in Africa, and WW2 wasn't that big of a deal in a lot of the continent. A lot of them had other shit going on, still do.
The internet and easy-to-access translators are more common now, leading to a further decline in the name, but in Namibia in the 1960's? Totally understandable someone would hear/see the name Adolf Hitler without context, assume a strong German name would help their kid get by in German-Occupied Namibia, and leave it at that. Looks like it worked.
Thought this satire at first.
c/NotTheOnion
The local pol said he usually goes by Adolf Uunona in daily life and argued it’s too late to formally change his name.
“It’s in all official documents. It’s too late for that,” he told German newspaper Bild in 2020.
For context for folks in the US, the US makes it pretty easy to change your name. Ditto for a number of other countries that derive from the British legal tradition. A number of countries have considerably more restrictive law on this point.
How do you change your name in Namibia?
- Change of Surname Change of Surname Forms.
- Police Clearance Certificate.
- Original Birth Certificate (including dependants' certificates, if included in application)
- Certified copy of ID.
- Affidavit with Declaration Statement setting out why you are requesting a change of surname.
- Notices in Government Gazette
It's not that fucking hard to not be Adolf Hitler
That's assuming the original birth certificate still exists. I don't know how well these things were archived in Namibia in the 1960s, but I wouldn't just assume it could still be found.
Same in Quebec, except there's no need for the police clearance certificate.
I see a lot of people nowadays trying very hard to be him
Interesting to compare and contrast with Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe who deliberately wore a toothbrush moustache and referred to himself as "The Hitler of our time".
Also interesting that now Mugabe is dead, there seem to be quite a few potential candidates for that title.
But, as best as I can tell, Uunona isn't in the running there.