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Jewish group slams Italy’s ‘Nazi’ wine

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is urging wine distributors to boycott the Italian company behind a range of wines emblazoned with images of dictators and Nazi slogans.

Published: 11 August 2013 10:30 CEST
Jewish group slams Italy's 'Nazi' wine
Hitler Wine. Photo: Håvard Furulund

“Enough is enough,” Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, founder and dean and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, said in a statement.

The Rabbis are urging wine distributors in Italy and around the world “not to do any business with someone using the Nazi mass murderer as a blatant marketing tool.”

The statement comes a few days after The Local published a story about a Norwegian couple who stumbled across the wine, featuring images including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, in a shop in the seaside resort of Rimini.

The Rabbis said they first protested against the wine when it was launched by Vini Lunardelli, a wine company in Udine, in 1995.

“Now an expanded line of wines that demean, diminish and mock Hitler's victims are promoted on a slick website.”

Alessandro Lunardelli, the wine company owner, told The Local last week that the range was intended as a ‘joke gift’ and was not meant to offend anyone. He said the wine is mainly purchased by tourists visiting Italy, although it’s also popular with foreigners buying online from abroad.

"We reject the cynical notion by the company's owner that this wine is marketed as "a joke gift", the Wiesenthal officials added.

"We agree totally with the sentiments expressed recently by a shocked Norweigian tourist when he found the wine on sale in Rimini, Italy.”

This isn’t the first time Vini Lunardelli has come under fire for what it calls its “historical range”.

A probe was launched last year following several other complaints from foreign tourists.

The Italian Integration Minister at the time, Andrea Riccardi, said “this offends the memory of millions of people and risks compromising the image of Italy abroad.”

Lunardelli told The Local that the investigation found the company not to be in the wrong as the wines weren’t intended to be “political or offensive, just marketing”.

The Rabbis concluded: "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?" 

Meanwhile, other tourists have confirmed to The Local that Third Reich wine was also being sold in a store in Lake Garda, northern Italy featuring images of Hitler and other leading generals from the Nazi era. The store, however, had erected a large sign around the wine telling tourists that taking pictures of the bottles was forbidden.

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NAZIS

Austria: Newly discovered letters from Hitler’s father reveal dictator’s ‘genius complex’

Letters found stashed in an Austrian attic sent by the father of Adolf Hitler have shed light on the tyrant's upbringing.

Published: 12 March 2021 13:34 CET
Austria: Newly discovered letters from Hitler's father reveal dictator's 'genius complex'
Photo: Alex Halada/AFP

When he was first contacted by a woman claiming to have discovered letters written by Adolf Hitler’s father, Roman Sandgruber was understandably wary.

“Given all the forgeries and self-proclaimed ‘eyewitnesses’ who’ve come forward in the past, you think: ‘There can’t be much to it’,” the Austrian historian says.

“But then when I went down there and actually had a look at them, I realised straight away: ‘This is a sensation’.”

The original seals, the vintage postmarks, the authentic signature — left him with little doubt the letters were genuine.

Before the accidental discovery, sources about Hitler’s father Alois had been so scarce that, to Sandgruber’s knowledge, no biography of him has ever been published.

Along with other new sources, these 31 letters have helped Sandgruber write the first such volume — “Hitler’s Father: How The Son Became A Dictator” — and bring new insights into the milieu the Nazi tyrant grew up in.

The letters were written by Alois Hitler to a road maintenance official called Josef Radlegger, concerning the latter’s sale of a farmhouse in the village of Hafeld to Alois in 1895, when Adolf was six years old.

“They aren’t just letters about business, there’s a very familiar atmosphere between the two correspondents and there’s a lot of family gossip,” Sandgruber tells AFP in the University of Linz’s history library, while carefully removing the letters from the bundle they were kept in for decades.

Though Alois was known to be a “very tyrannical head of the family”, Sandgruber says the letters also offer an occasional glimpse at congeniality in his home life.

To Alois, his wife Klara was more than the “silent housewife” later described by Adolf in Mein Kampf.

One of the few people Alois had anything positive to say about, Sandgruber believes her to have been “a thoroughly emancipated woman, as we would put it today”.

“One can assume that she certainly had a say in the household,” Sandgruber notes, and particularly when it came to money matters.

“My wife… has the necessary enthusiasm and understanding for finances,” Alois writes in one of the letters.

Moreover, the letters are testament to Alois’s rise through Austrian society and his dream of becoming a country gentleman with his own farm. 

‘Genius’ complex 

The new treasure trove of documents may never have seen the light of day had pensioner Anneliese Smigielski not decided to clear-out and insulate her attic a few years ago.

She had always known that her great-great-grandfather Radlegger had sold property to Alois Hitler, and wasn’t particularly surprised to find the letters among more than 500 others, all meticulously kept in boxes.

But after a few attempts to follow Alois’s irritable messages — “he seemed to get annoyed about everything” — Smigielski found the sloping Kurrent script too hard to decode and thought it needed the attention of an expert.

Smigielski knew of Sandgruber’s previous work on the history of Upper Austria and got in touch with him in 2017, thinking he would be able to make some use of them.

While Alois is known to have made anti-Semitic statements when he himself dabbled in politics later in life, Sandgruber is wary of making too many direct connections between the father’s politics and those of his son.

He says the important influence on Adolf was the racist and anti-Semitic currents of thought which were present more generally in the Austria of his childhood.

However, Sandgruber says the one trait which undoubtedly united the two of them was “the very strong influence of being self-taught”.

“The result of that is as with the father, the son despised all those who had been through a regular school career — academics, notaries, judges, and later even military officers,” he says.

“He thinks that he alone is the genius,” Sandgruber adds.

He has been taken aback by the international attention his book from an Austrian publisher has received, garnering press coverage as far afield as Peru and China.

Smigielski herself also confesses to being a little overwhelmed by the press attention which has followed her attic discovery, saying it feels like “being a hare in the middle of the hunt”.

“But it will die down,” she says hopefully.

Perhaps not anytime soon though, such is the interest in the book that it entered its second print run just one week after publication on February 22.

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