Image by Instagram

By Aiden Pink February 28, 2018

A Polish company is under fire for trying to sell socks that look like Adolf Hitler — and then trying to hide the evidence.

Nanushki, a company that specializes in friendly-looking socks, offers the footwear on its website. The company originally claimed that the “Adolf” socks were designed “to bring order in the socks drawer,” the New York Post reported.

The design was noticed by the the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, who denounced the brand for using “one of the biggest criminals in history for marketing purposes.”

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

Afterward, the company renamed the socks from “Adolf” to “Patrick,” claiming on its website that Patrick was “a broker, financier, businessman and philanthropist” who “definitely does not like to talk about his past, though in the depths of his cotton soul he longs for a time when everything was simpler.”

They did not totally eliminate traces of the socks’ Nazi past — the file names of the photos on the website are still titled “Adolf Socks” and “Hitler Socks.”

The socks are available in various sizes for 25 zloty, or $7.33.

Ties between Poland and the global Jewish community have been severely strained in the past few months over a new law that criminalizes blaming the Polish people for Nazi crimes or using phrases such as “Polish death camps.” Poland’s Prime Minister was harshly criticized after he said earlier this month that the Holocaust also had “Jewish perpetrators,” a claim that he later walked back.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount