Danish national final singer Kim Larsen has launched a campaign called “Gesundheit macht frei”. It is being criticized for the inspiration from the old Nazi slogan “Arbeit macht frei”, a deliberate choice as they believe that strong smoking laws take away people’s personal freedom.
Kim Larsen’s manager Jørn Jeppesen says that the slogan is indeed inspired from the nazi slogan and he finds it quite suitable as the German regime under Adolf Hitler was the first to make smoking restrictions in their attempt to create the Perfect Race.
The campaign is criticized for hurting the people who survived the concentration camps and for dishonouring the millions of people who died during holocaust in the Second World War. Jørn Jeppesen states that this is not the intention and that it is simply to show that the smoking bans are going too far as they take the personal freedom away from people just because they have one thing which is considered wrong for the pure, clean human: a smoking habit. He continues: “It is a totalitarian state that introduces that kind of freedom- limited laws. The campaign might just as well refer to the communism that controlled the people with just as totalitarian methods as the Nazism".
