Hitler Wine Bottles Will Remain On Shelves In Italy Despite Complaints
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Despite complaints from anti-fascist groups, wine bottles featuring Adolf Hitler will remain on sale for the time being in the Italian city of Remini.
Mayor Andrea Grassi said his hands were tied when it comes to regulating the products, The Times of Israel reported.
The wine comes from Italian winemaker Vina Lunardelli’s cult “Historical Series” collection, which depicts dictators ranging from Napoleon to Hitler. The Hitler series, titled “Der Fuhrer,” includes both pictures of the dictator and Nazi slogans. The company has previously stated that the wines were meant as “joke gifts.”
Gnassi said that he has received complaints previously over the bottles. However, he claimed that he lacks a larger framework to address such concerns: Without national legislation regulating fascist products, municipalities that attempted direct action against such products have been reprimanded by courts, which ruled in the traders’ favor.
“We receive reports like this at least five to six times a year,” Gnassi told The Times of Israel. “As long as a new law is not approved, all attempts at [action by the municipality] can achieve nothing.”
Lunardelli’s “Historical Series” products have faced controversy since their creation in 1995. The Forward wrote about the Hitler and Mussolini wines in 2010, an American couple complained about the wines in 2012 and the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for a boycott in 2013.
Despite these multiple objections, the company’s website says that about half of their wine production is devoted to creating the series, called “cult objects among collectors.”
Contact Juliana Kaplan at kaplan@forward.com or on Twitter, @julianamkaplan
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