AMERSFOORT, Netherlands-Several dozen protesters gathered outside a theater in the Netherlands Saturday where a singer who once performed for Adolf Hitler was due to take the stage in his native country for the first time in four decades.

Johannes Heesters, 104, has been a popular figure in German-language cabaret since the 1930s, earning him the epithet “the Netherlands’ most durable product.”

He was never accused of being a propagandist or anything other than an actor who was willing to perform for the Nazis, and the Allies allowed him to continue his career after the war. But in his native country he is viewed by some as irredeemable.

“He kept singing for the Nazi regime, for the Wehrmacht, and he earned millions,” said Piet Schouten, representative of a committee formed to protest Heesters’ performance.

“Those are facts and we have a problem with that on behalf of all the victims” he told national broadcaster NOS.

In Heesters’ previous attempt to perform in the Netherlands, in 1964, he was booed off the stage in Amsterdam when he tried to appear as Nazi-hating Captain von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.”

Around 50 demonstrators gathered outside De Flint theater in Amersfoort, where Heesters was born in 1903. A handful of neo-nazis turned up, uninvited, to support Heesters, and several were detained by police after throwing eggs at the demonstrators.

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The Holocaust memorial in Berlin is showing signs of serious wear and tear just three years after its completion, with cracks in more than half of its concrete blocks, according to a study published on Monday.

Structural engineer Joachim Schulz conducted a survey of the field of blocks located in Berlin’s central Mitte district at the end of last year for Germany’s Cicero magazine.

Almost fourteen hundred of the 2,711 blocks that make up the site are beginning to crack, he said in an interview published in the monthly magazine’s latest edition.

“Sixty percent of the cracks are minor faults and not really visible but 40 percent are bigger than 0.2 millimeters and that’s worrying,” said Schulz.

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