The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) has urged local retailers to stop selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Adolf Hitler European Tour 1939-45,” a list of countries and dates they were invaded by Nazi Germany in World War II, and a picture of Hitler sporting a swastika and doing the Nazi salute over a European map.
Manuel Prutschi, the CJC director of community relations, said the T-shirt is on sale at several stores in the downtown shopping area. One of them, the Toronto Bargain Centre on Yonge Street, took the shirts off the market last week after a CJC official asked them to, said Prutschi, and the CJC appreciated the store’s “immediate cooperation.”
The T-shirt resembles those designed to mark the tours of popular rock stars. Prutschi said most people who sell and wear the shirts are not doing so “with deliberate malice but out of insensitivity.” But he stressed that “the use of Nazi symbols for commercial purposes is almost a whitewash of the horrendousness of the period” of Nazi tyranny.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
