The Simon Wiesenthal Center is urging wine distributors to boycott an Italian company that has created a niche market selling a line of Nazi and fascist wines including labels with Adolph Hitler with Nazi slogans, including ‘Mein Fuehrer’, ‘Seig Heil’ and ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer’.
“Enough is enough,” declared Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Founder and Dean and Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish Human Rights group.
“We first protested the marketing of ‘Führerwein’ by Vina Lunardelli, an Italian-based company in 1995. Now an expanded line of wines that demean, diminish and mock Hitler’s victims are promoted on a slick website,” they added.
“We reject the cynical notion by the company’s owner that this wine is marketed as “a joke gift”, the Wiesenthal Center officials charged, adding, “We agree totally with the sentiments expressed recently by a shocked Norweigian tourist when he found the wine on sale in Rimini, Italy:
“There can only be two kinds of people who are buying this wine: you have people who actually identify with these kinds of thoughts, and you have young people who haven’t lived through the Second World War, so they think it’s funny, it is almost a joke.”
“How sickening is it that such a company operates in a country which first embraced Fascism and later when occupied by the Germans saw many of its countrymen executed by the Nazi Third Reich? The Wiesenthal Center denounces the marketing of these products and urges wine distributors in Italy and around the world to send the only message the owner of this firm might understand, that they choose not to do any business with someone using the Nazi mass murderer as a blatant marketing tool,” the Rabbis concluded.
