WWE Files Trademark for Ring Name Shared by Nazi Officer
Not a great idea
WWE should have done a quick Google search before filing a trademark application to rename one of its wrestlers.
Austrian-born Walter Hahn has been the biggest star of WWE’s NXT UK brand since signing with the company in 2019, wrestling under the mononym Walter (often stylized as WALTER to emphasize his hard-hitting, intimidating nature). Earlier this month, he joined the stateside NXT brand, reuniting with Fabian Aichner and Marcel Barthel of his Imperium stable.
On Jan. 13, the same day that Walter’s final NXT UK match aired, WWE filed a trademark application for the ring name Gunther Stark. The filing flew under the radar until Louis Dangoor of British website Give Me Sport pointed out on Tuesday that just a few seconds of research was enough to find that “Gunther Stark” was the name of the commander of a Nazi U-boat sunk in the English Channel in 1944.
On Tuesday night, after winning his match against Roderick Strong, Walter announced that he would now be known as Gunther.
WWE is presumably smart enough to have dropped Walter’s new last name at the last second after its origins became publicized, but that isn’t the only Nazi-adjacent imagery Imperium has trafficked in recently. Last week, Barthel (who is from Germany) tweeted and deleted the phrase “IMPERIUM over everything,” according to German site Power Wrestling, a reference to the first verse of the German national anthem. Since the end of World War II, only the third verse of the song has been sung as the national anthem. The first two verses, and the first in particular, while not outlawed, are frowned upon, because of their ties to the Nazis.
Walter also tweeted the German word for invasion (“einmarsch”) with a photo of him beside Barthel and Aichner, who is from a German-speaking area of Italy. An Austrian guy talking about invading territory with a German and an Italian should rub people the wrong way.
Assuming WWE scraps plans to use the full Gunther Stark name, this story should blow over relatively quickly. Nothing about Walter’s on-screen persona has evoked fascism in the past. Imperium is just three guys who are going to beat the crap out of you. But as WWE moves towards a more character-driven NXT (one of its new wrestlers is a stereotypical Italian-American mobster who shares a name with a famously oafish hockey player), it isn’t out of the question that Hahn, Barthel and Aichner could be asked to toe a fine line.
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A good song
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