bloomberg ^ | 09/04/03 | BG
German Justice Minister Complains About Italian `Hitler' Wine Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries has urged her Italian counterpart Roberto Castelli to take action against a company that sells ``Fuehrerwein'' and bottles featuring pictures of Nazi leaders including Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler.
The pictures and slogans including ``Sieg Heil'' are ``reprehensible and tasteless,'' Zypries said in a letter to Castelli. Germany, unlike Italy, prohibits the public display of Nazi symbols and slogans.
``Minister Zypries has asked her colleague to look into this matter,'' said a spokesman for the Justice Ministry. The German government through its embassy in Rome has tried since 1997 to stop the sale of the company's wines, she said.
Relations between German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi soured in July when Berlusconi likened a German politician to a Nazi and an Italian junior minister described German tourists as ``uniform and loud blonds invading Italian beaches.'' Italy holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union.
In its ``Historical Series'' of wines, the company also sells bottles emblazoned with images of Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara.
``Thanks to this invention, the wine company Alessandro Lunardelli has obtained a lot of attention from the media all over the world both for the originality of the idea and for the quality of the wines,'' the company says on its Web site.
