Bad Doberan, (Germany) : A Baltic Sea coastal town has revoked the honorary citizenship of Adolf Hitler just two months before leaders of the world's major industrial nations meet here.

The town council of Bad Doberan formally revoked the citizenship in a unanimous vote taken Monday evening, a spokesman for the mayor's office said Tuesday.

The town, which made Hitler an honorary citizen in 1932, nearly a year before he became leader of Germany, will host a summit of the Group of Eight during June 6-8 in its coastal suburb of Heiligendamm.

The citizenship issue made headlines after it was made public by G8 opponents and picked up by the international press.

Town authorities felt that the honour automatically ended with Hitler's death in 1945, but decided to formally rescind it in order to draw a line under the past and avoid a potential embarrassment during the G8 summit.

From the end of the war in May, 1945 until German reunification in 1990, Bad Doberan had belonged to the former communist East Germany.

Many German towns made the Nazi dictator an honorary citizen, but most struck him off their list in symbolic acts after the end of the war.

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