ZAGREB - Croatian prosecutors have opened a criminal probe after Adolf Hitler's image and jokes about the Holocaust allegedly appeared on packets of sugar in cafes in the eastern part of the country. "The State Attorney's Office in Pozega has demanded an investigation into the alleged printing of the said material on sugar packages," spokeswoman Martina Mihordin said yesterday. The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were produced on their premises. The Nazi-supporting Ustasha regime ran the country during the Second World War and thousands of Croats, Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were killed in Croatian concentration camps. Nazi insignia and fascist propaganda are banned in the country, which is seeking to join the European Union by the end of the decade. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jerusalem-based group that hunts Nazis, said it was "repulsed and sickened that such a product could today be produced in a country that not only had a Holocaust on its territory, but that had it in the most part done by local Nazi collaborators."

(Copyright National Post 2007)