TEMPO.CO, Berlin - Some people think they see statues of saints weeping or an image of Jesus in their toast. A woman in western Germany recently thought she saw Adolf Hitler on a cup, nestled between rose petals and gaudy English writing. It turns out she was not imagining the profile of the man with a toothbrush mustache.
The question of how hundreds of cups bearing a stamp from the Third Reich showing Hitler’s profile made their way to the shelves of a family-owned furniture and housewares chain has become a matter for the authorities. On Friday, prosecutors in Dortmund said they had opened an investigation over a display of Nazi symbols, which is illegal in Germany.
"Nothing like this has ever happened in 75 years that my family has been in the business," said Christian Zurbrüggen, director of the chain based in Unna, Germany, that bears his family’s name. He said the cups had been ordered from a producer in China and nobody noticed the stamp, visible only on some of the cups, when they were unpacked and put on display.
The kitschy, vintage-style cups were on sale for three days at the Zurbrüggen stores before anyone noticed the small stamp showing the profile of the Nazi dictator above the word "Reich", complete with a swastika postmark.
"Our workers are dismayed and embarrassed, the producer has apologized for the error, and we have apologized to our customers for this terrible mistake that resulted from a chain of unfortunate circumstances," Mr. Zurbrüggen said in a telephone interview.
Customers have been offered a 20-euro gift certificate in exchange for returning their Hitler cup, which originally sold for 1.99 euros.
The cups came to the public's attention after a woman from the city of Herford, identified only as Agnes T, brought a cup to her local newspaper, the Neue Westfälische. "I thought I wasn’t seeing right," she told the newspaper.
So far, 16 of the 175 sold have been returned, reflecting a certain popularity of the cups that caught the attention of the German media and even stirred the interest of the country’s Museum of Contemporary History.
"It is our mission to collect objects that have a relevance to contemporary culture," said Peter Hoffmann, a spokesman for the museum in Bonn. The museum’s interest does not lie in the uproar surrounding the cups, Mr. Hoffmann said.
"It’s the story that is behind the cup that is interesting," he said. "But we don’t know right now how it came to be, whether it was intended as a joke, or was simply ignorance."
Mr. Zurbrüggen said his company was cooperating with prosecutors to help resolve that very question and have inquired with the Chinese producers and the company that designed the cup. The remaining stock has been destroyed, he said.
Germans are highly sensitized to reproductions of Nazi symbols, which are banned in the country, and move swiftly to remove them or take action against anyone displaying them. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of this, every time an image of Hitler pops up somewhere, it still causes a sensation.
"Whenever Hitler shows up, the world shows an interest," Mr. Hoffmann said.
NEW YORK TIMES | MARIA RITA HASUGIAN
