Coffee With Hitler

Awkward:

Mr. Cerf said the mishap had occurred when an outside company asked ELSA, a dairy manufacturer and Migros subsidiary, to supply a series of 55 coffee cream containers based on vintage cigar labels, two of which featured the dictators.

He said that the outside company had provided the controversial designs, and that ELSA typically produced plastic creamers with charming and innocuous images on them — not fascists.

“I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls,” Mr. Cerf said. “Usually the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes and dogs — nothing polemic that can pose a problem.”

...But Mr. Cerf emphasized that the accidental circulation of the plastic Hitler creamers had nothing to do with the country’s social mores, but rather reflected an isolated mistake.

Migros is not the first company to run into such trouble. In the spring, a German furniture chain apologized for selling ceramic mugs with Hitler’s face on them, saying a Chinese designer had mistakenly used an old image of a stamp bearing the dictator’s image behind an antique motif of roses.