Pour Some Hitler On Me!

It turns out the sugar packets of choice in Croatia’s coffee houses these days tend to have pictures of Hitler on them. Why the image of Hitler on something so sweet you might ask? Simple, Croatia’s perception of Hitler’s personality is much different from that of you or I, or the civilized world for that matter.

Between 1941 and 1945 when the Croats were not busy being willing enforcers of Nazi ethnic laws, in which they killed thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, they were enjoying a public honeymoon with their “Zasladiti Uvodni” (Sugar Führer).

Hitler first ingratiated himself to the Croatian people upon his 1942 visit to Zagreb, wherein he delivered a speech not from high on stage behind a podium, but from ground level with the people, behind a deep fryer in St. Mark’s Square where he served fried dough, spoke of “the Zionist Diabetic Plot,” and added liberal helpings of powdered sugar and honey to each serving of his tyrannous treats.

The Croats’ cuddly image of a sugar loving Hitler was further reinforced on subsequent visits to their country. In 1943 Hitler visited Croatia again and this time donned a chef’s hat in a bakery outside of Karlovac, where he baked schnitzel; distributing them to visiting Polish dignitaries who barked their orders at the flour covered führer from the other side of a glass case displaying cakes. And when Hitler sent a gift basket of gummi-bears to Winston Churchill, it was only Croatian papers which ran the puff piece under the headline, “Reich Reaches out to British for Savory Surrender.”

It was after these and countless other Hitler with sweets occurrences in the news that many Croat marketing firms began associating their products with famous Nazi figures in an effort to establish a bit of lebensraum in a crowded candy marketplace. There was Adolph Eichmann’s Ice-cream sandwiches, Goebbels Gumballs, and Heinrich Himmler’s Homemade Ham Glaze (Hitler himself never endorsed any Croatian candies) . It is still true today that Croatia’s most popular hard candy remains Necco’s Kristallnacht Candies.

Although Croatia has come a long way from it’s dark days of the early 40’s where the Ustasha gladly did the Nazi’s bidding, it may be some time before you can enjoy a cup of joe in Croatia without seeing the face of history’s most brutal dictator.