Hitler mug shop faces visit from police

Two coffee mugs featuring a picture of a stamp with Adolf Hitler’s portrait on it can be seen in Herford, western Germany.

DPA/Berlin

A German furniture chain which inadvertently sold mugs carrying a faded image of Adolf Hitler will have to explain themselves to police, prosecutors said yesterday.

Despite the controversy, Germany’s official history museum is eager to acquire one of the coffee mugs – sold by the Zurbrueggen furniture chain in the town of Unna – to use in future exhibitions.

Prosecutor Barbara Vogelsang confirmed that an inquiry had been launched into the sale of the mugs, which are decorated with roses, handwriting in English and a Nazi-era postage stamp featuring a swastika.

Neither Zurbrueggen’s buyers nor its retail staff noticed the image before the Chinese-made mugs hit the shelves for a bargain price of 1.99 euros ($2.80).

The chain is offering shoppers a voucher for 10 times the amount to return the mugs.

The chain’s proprietor Christian Zurbrueggen said that only eight of the 175 mugs sold had been returned. The other 4,825 in stock would be smashed, he added.

German law forbids the use of “anti-constitutional symbols”.

Police will now investigate who ordered the mugs and who ought to have checked that they were legal.

The Federal House of History in Bonn, meanwhile, has no qualms about obtaining the mug.

A spokesman, Peter Hoffmann, said that the museum’s job was to collect items of contemporary history.

The mug could be preserved for use in a future exhibition.

Hoffmann stressed that the museum would not bid at auction for one of the mugs and that it would only pay the two-euro sale price.

Swastikas are allowed to be displayed when educating people about Nazism.