Each year Germany’s largest grocery chain Edeka unveils its highly anticipated Christmas ad that typically tugs on the old heartstrings with themes around families getting together for the festive season.
This year’s effort shows parents so busy organising Christmas they’re ignoring their kids who look on lonely and neglected. Check it out (with subtitles) here:
However, the harmless enough looking ad is now being accused of having subliminal neo-Nazi messages.
According to the English-speaking Spiegel Online, the family car in the opening scene has the number plates MU SS 420. The SS, of course, was Hitler’s own personal paramilitary organisation that carried out the most heinous of crimes during WW2. While 420 is reportedly code for Hitler’s birthday, as he was born on the 20th of April (the fourth month of the year).
According to Spiegel, anything associated with Hitler is pretty much banned in Germany, so neo-Nazis in the country often use codes to covertly identify themselves with one another.
Further into the ad, when a car is shown at a workshop, the number plate reads SO LL 3849. Allegedly, ‘84’ is used as code for ‘Heil Deutschland’, and is bracketed by the numbers 3 and 9 which combined together stand for ‘Christian Identity’, a known anti-Semitic religious group.
While the ad also seems to show good, old-fashioned blonde Aryan family values – something the Nazis were particularly fond of.
Naturally, Edeka has strenuously denied the TVC is trying to promote Nazism, but rather flog more Christmas turkeys.
However, Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, director of the regional centre for political education in Hamburg, was less sure: “I don’t believe it’s a faux pas, as some people are suggesting on the internet. Considering the number of far-right codes accumulated here, that is disarming and implausible.”
