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Notebooks Featuring Hitler Broke No Laws, Russian Prosecutors Find

Prosecutors in the western Smolensk region have determined that no laws were broken when a local printing house produced school notebooks featuring Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as the instigator of World War II, a news report said.

Prosecutors were checking the work of a Smolensk printing house for possible "extremist activities," but found none, TASS news agency reported Thursday, citing a spokesperson for the local prosecutor's office.

The inquiry was prompted by complaints from activists in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg who saw the notebooks in stores. Investigators traced the stationery to the Smolensk printing house owned by a publisher of educational literature, TASS reported.

The notebooks featured various historical figures, along with their brief biographies, on its pages, including Hitler as the "main initiator of World War II," the report said. The books carried no Nazi symbols or anything else that could be considered illegal under Russia's ban on promoting Nazism, according to the report.

About 60,000 notebooks were printed, TASS reported.


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