Italian winery defends use of ‘Nazi mass murderer’ Hitler on labels

We asked the European Commission whether it was illegal to use such labels, and a spokeswoman told BeverageDaily.com:“The issue is not covered in the wine legislation…and it seems to be within the competence of the member states.”​

Andrea Lunardelli, direct manager of Udinese winery Vina Lunardelli, and creator of the Linea dalla Storia (or Historical Line), told this website that the firm began the series as a joke following a customer request and now sold many bottles via wine shops in Italy and online.

 “But we never want to do politics or to eulogize Hitler and his men or Mussolini or to offend someone,”​ he said, noting cryptically that the firm had won five court cases over its labels.

“In fact, we have removed Nazi symbols from the images like the swastika and the SS symbol…we never used racist phrases but only nationalist phrases or names of the characters,”​ Lunardelli added.

Swastika, SS symbol used by copycats?​

However, other copycat sellers did use these symbols, Lunardelli insisted, even though his ‘rivals’ don’t produce their own wines; most of his sales come from Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe.

Other historical characters – Lenin, Stalin, Gramsci, Napolean, Dracula, Sissi, famous painters – also featured on the winery’s other labels, he added, while the company planned a great composers line.

None of which will impress the New York-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose dean and associate dean, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, proclaimed last Thursday that “enough is enough”.​

They called for Italian wine distributors to stop doing business “with someone using the Nazi mass murderer [Hitler] as a blatant marketing tool”.​

“How sickening is it that such a company operates in a country that first embraced Fascism and later, when occupied by the Germans, saw many of its countrymen executed by the Nazi Third Reich?”​ the Rabbis added.

The controversial wines are not sold in the US – the firm does not have an importer – but Lunardelli said that following controversy over the wines in 2012 he received 200+ email orders that the firm “unfortunately”​ could not fulfill.

‘Innocent wine labels’ not to blame​

Noting that famous “bad characters”​ such as Hitler could not return, Lunardelli identified a ”bigger problem and enemy”​, namely, “multinational corporations and their soldiers”​ and politicians.

People were shocked by “innocent wine labels”​ and not the “new monsters”​, Lunardelli said, while nonetheless offering an apology to Jewish people.

He insisted that he had no intention to offend Jews and that he respected “all human races, all poor people, all people in difficulty”​.

“We only try to work to survive, and the good thing with this marketing is that we have gained new customers because… labels attract new customers to taste our good wine inside,”​ Lunardelli added.

But Hier and Cooper said they first protested against Vina Lunardelli’s marketing in1995.

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

Only two kinds of people must buy the wine, the Rabbis added. People who identify with the thoughts, and young people who hadn’t lived through WW2, who thought it was funny or “some kind of joke”.​

(Picture Credit for inline image: Lee Coursey/Flickr)