The Simon Wiesenthal Center calls for distributors to boycott wine brand featuring Adolf Hitler on its label
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a global Jewish human rights organization set up to oppose anti-Semitism, and defend the Jewish community, has called for wine distributors to boycott an Italian wine company distributing bottles featuring Adolf Hitler.
The centre, which originally protested the company’s use of Hitler on its bottles, alongside Nazi slogans 'Mein Fuehrer', 'Sieg Heil' and 'Ein Volk in 1995, has renewed its called to boycott the ‘Führerwein’ brand.
Since then, the brand has expanded its range, while continuing to bear the image of historical leaders such as Churchill, Stalin and Mussolini.
"We reject the cynical notion by the company's owner that this wine is marketed as "a joke gift,” commented the Centre’s founders Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper.
They added: "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 Centre 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 latest outcry by the centre follows the discovery of the sale of the wine by a Norwegian tourist while in Rimini, Italy.