JERUSALEM- The Simon Wiesenthal Center today protested the manufacture and distribution throughout Croatia of sugar packets bearing the likeness of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler along with tasteless jokes about Jews incarcerated in concentration camps, by the “Pinki” sugar company of Požega, Croatia.
In a statement issued today in Jerusalem by its chief Nazi-hunter Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center expressed its revulsion and disgust that such an item could be produced these days in a country in which the Holocaust not only took place, but was for the most part carried out by local Nazi collaborators.
According to Zuroff:
“One finds it hard to understand what “Pinki” factory owner Anita Ivanesic was thinking when she initiated or approved of such an idea. If nothing else, this is a disgusting expression of nostalgia for the Third Reich and a period during which Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies were mass-murdered in independent Croatia. We urge the Croatian authorities to apply existing laws against incitement on religious, ethnic, and racial grounds against the “Pinki” factory and its owner and force them to recall the offensive sugar packets immediately. In a country in which so many innocent civilians were murdered by the Ustasha and the Nazis, there can be no tolerance for products which not only insult the memory of the fascists’ victims but encourage a revival of the killers’ lethal ideology.”
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