"It is a purely political gesture in view of the Group of Eight summit to be held in June in neighboring Heiligendamm, an administrative part of the Bad Doberan district," the local chancellery said citing Mayor Hartmut Polzin.
Bad Doberan elected Hitler an honorary citizen during the Nazi rule like many other German cities. But local authorities moved to officially abolish the Nazi leader's status posthumously to end legal debates ahead of the G8 summit.
"The town council decided to formally strip Hitler of the honorary title in Bad Doberan to prevent any awkwardness from overshadowing the summit," an official in the local administration said.
Some politicians in Germany have also spoken about posthumously stripping Hitler of German citizenship.
Austrian-born Hitler had his Austrian citizenship annulled in 1925 and became a German citizen automatically in 1932 when he was elected to the government of Braunschweig.
Simon Kopelke, parliamentary spokesman for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the state of Lower Saxony, said lawmakers had already sent legal requests to the effect.
Historians and Social Democrats agree that this symbolic gesture would demonstrate the negative attitude of parliamentarians and government officials in the state to nationalist socialism ideas.
