A vile online beauty pageant called 'Miss Hitler' has been shut down after attracting neo-Nazi women from across the globe to pose with swastikas and copies of Mein Kampf.
A page dedicated to the horrifying contest on VKontakte - the Russian equivalent of Facebook - asked neo-Nazis to join in the vote and find a winner who was 'radical and fanatical for Hitler'.
The sickening competition had finalists from Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States, who were pictured in Nazi uniforms, making the the Hitler salute and holding copies of Mein Kampf.
The page has now been suspended after alleged 'calls to violence' but profile pages belonging to individual entrants, including 'Miss Edelweiss' and 'Miss Eva Braun' are still online.
One contestant even had the Reichsadler – a Nazi emblem with an eagle atop a swastika – tattooed across her back.
The sick page had attracted thousands of views before it was shut down yesterday.
Contest organisers said their aim was 'promoting Hitlerian culture; encouraging interaction between the Hitlerian community; clearing the image of Adolf Hitler, showing [the] beauty of Hitlerian culture' and to 'protect and defend women'.
VKontakte – which is used by 68 per cent of Russians with internet access – has faced a spate of criminal cases against its users for extremism.
After the Miss Hitler contest was drawn to its attention, VKontakte – also known as VK – closed the page and issued a statement condemning hate speech.
'The community was blocked due to violation of our rules,' a spokesperson said.
'VK is always intolerable to calls for violence, nationalist and extremist propaganda.
'Any person can report illegal, offensive or unreliable content with the help of the "report" button. We review all reports without any exceptions.
'VK has one of the biggest moderation teams and we react as fast as we possibly can — content that violates our rules or the law gets deleted and the violators get banned.'
Sova, which tracks radicalism and human rights violations in Russia, said 658 people were convicted for various forms of extremist speech last year, up from 133 in 2011.
About 90 per cent of the cases involved speech on the internet – and most of these were on social media, which is dominated by VKontakte in Russia.
In response, the website has allowed users to make their accounts fully private and unsearchable.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
