'Easter Like in Nazi Times', the Berliner Zeitung Opines

Militarisation is taking root, once more, in the heart of Europe--an op-ed decries the farcical wartime agit-prop from WW2 while the proverbial lessons of history are fast forgotten

Signs and wonders of our time, I suppose, are in store for us.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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Easter Like in Nazi Times: Militarisation à la Germany

Easter bunnies driving tanks was common theme during the Nazi era. Today, a bakery in Tübingen is producing exactly these sugar bunnies again. What's going on in Germany?

Op-ed by Raphael Schmeller, Berliner Zeitung, 16 April 2025 [source; archived]

People in Germany used to take to the streets at Easter to demonstrate for peace. Easter marches were an integral part of a society that had learnt from its history: never again war. The movement reached its peak in 1983—around 700,000 people demonstrated nationwide against nuclear armament.

Today? According to the organisers, there were only around 20,000 people in 2024. While fewer and fewer people are taking to the streets against war and armament, war motifs are appearing more and more frequently in everyday life—seemingly harmless, colourfully packaged and even sweet in taste. In Tübingen, for example, rabbits on tanks are rolling through the window of a bakery at Easter this year—made of icing, with howitzers, just like proud Wehrmacht soldiers in the shape of rabbits.

Easter in Tübingen this year, incl. bunnies driving tanks or manning guns.

It sounds like satire, but it is in fact very much serious: heavily armed bunnies are being sold at Easter in a branch of the traditional Tübingen company ‘Café Lieb’. Old moulds from the Second World War are used for this. The owner reacts to criticism with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘My God, it's part of our history, you can’t always negate everything,’ he tells [state broadcaster] SWR—and adds: ‘Children got the bunny in the tank for Easter back then.’

[Mr. Schmeller cites someone else’s piece but doesn’t link to it; here’s a few choice quotes from the SWR article (incl. a video, if you can stomach it):

The ‘Café Lieb’ bakery from Tübingen is bringing its sugar bunnies back to the sales counters for the upcoming Easter celebrations. On two campaign days this year, it also showed how the bunnies are made. And all the moulds from the past ninety years were taken out of the basement, including those with war motifs.

According to the master confectioner, the war motifs sold particularly well at the sales stand in front of the Tübingen bakery: ‘Old people say they remember them from their childhood. And many older people simply want to buy it again as a souvenir’, says Ulrich Buob. For decades, the bakery left its war motifs in the cupboard, but this year it decided to offer them for the two campaign days. Sadly, it fits in with the times, says the master confectioner.

Caption: master-confectioner Ulrich Buob shows how these historical moulds are filled with the sugary dough.

Loud Criticism: Are War Motifs Bad Taste?

The Informationsstelle Militarisierung [an anti-war association whose name translate into ‘Information Centre Militarisation, of IMI] heard about the campaign in the local paper Schwäbisches Tagblatt and is appalled. In an interview with SWR radio, association member Reza Schwarz says that such actions contribute to the banalisation and normalisation of the military and militarism: ‘Somehow, people are mourning the good old days of war. I think that’s a mockery of the people who were affected by it’, says Schwarz.

For the owner of the bakery, Hermann Leimgruber, sugar bunnies are part of the tradition—in all their forms. They have been passed down through generations for 90 years. He doesn’t understand the fuss: ‘My God, it’s part of our history. Children used to get the rabbit in a tank for Easter. You don’t always have to twist the world’, he says, justifying the action.

I’ll stop citing from that SWR piece here; they also asked ‘random’ passers-by, and they ‘all’ noted that Easter was a celebration of peace, not war. (Germany’s state broadcasters have a long and troubled recent history of passing politically expedient ‘strangers’ as ‘random people’, as per the Twitter/X account @OERRBlog).

And now back to the Berliner Zeitung’s op-ed.]

This is not only historically questionable, but above all tasteless. The Nazi past is being romanticised as nostalgic confectionery [well, as per the 1942 movie ‘To Be or Not To be’ by Ernst Lubitsch, ‘they made a brandy out of Napoleon, a herring out of Bismarck, and—Hitler’s gonna end of as a piece of cheese’, the protagonist played by Jack Benny jokes]. A tank as if from the Second World War, nicely decorated and ready for the Easter nest—as if it were all just a harmless gimmick.

The case is symptomatic of our times. The militarisation of everyday life has long been underway: Bundeswehr advertising on trams, camouflage-coloured popcorn tubs in cinemas—war is creeping into our consciousness, not as a state of emergency, but as part of normality. Or worse still: as an entertaining accessory [as long as it’s far away; perhaps we should ask a Ukrainian refugee or front-line soldier about it? Then again, here’s an example from the Austrian leftish rag Der Standard from the front lines, in case you’re wondering whether this would make a difference, incl. pictures:

On Tour with the 'Azov' Neo-Nazis: Austrian Media Continues to Delude itself and Gaslight its Readers

And now back to the Berliner Zeitung’s op-ed.]

This development began with the so-called Zeitenwende [which translates into something like ‘sea change] that Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed in 2022. A special fund [every time a politico™ or journo™ notes that term, debt is meant] of 100 billion euros for the rearmament of the Bundeswehr was agreed at record speed. The CDU/CSU, SPD, and Greens have now gone even further: they have agreed on a permanent rearmament programme without a financial ceiling. And the direction is also clear at the EU level: up to 800 billion euros are to be invested in military structures and armaments over the next few years. What began as an exception is becoming the new political normality [see below for further particulars on the EU angle].

There is currently even an open discussion about the reintroduction of compulsory military service, which for decades was considered a relic of the Cold War and was only abolished in 2011 [misinformation: it was ‘paused’; it was not ‘abolished’, and since that’s the case, it can be ‘re-activated’ by decree and doesn’t require an act of parliament]. What was criticised at the time as authoritarian and outdated is now being repackaged as ‘civic-mindedness’ and a ‘sense of duty’. This is also part of the new reality: readiness for war is to become a matter of course again—not only institutionally, but also in our thinking [the most disgusting thing here is that conscription is now talked to also apply to women: this is insane and akin to a death wish, and while I’m in no way intimating that women have no place in wartime, there’s a more obvious reason why men are supposed to do the fighting: we’re expendable—no women, no children = no future; weak societies send women to the battlefield (here’s looking at you, American and Israel)].

Critics of War Defamed as Putin Apologists

Anyone who points out this development is quickly labelled a ‘lumpenpacifist’ or ‘Putin apologist’. This is precisely the problem: every criticism is stifled with pseudo-arguments, every warning is defamed as naive. But it is not pacifism that is naive. What is naive is the belief that more weapons mean more security.

Easter used to symbolise peace. Today, the Easter bunny drives a tank [again].

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Bottom Lines

Instead of adding my own musings, I shall cite at-length from John Flynn’s As We Go Marching (1944), specifically from Part Three, Chapter IV (but I highly recommend reading the entire book):

Far more important than war is the preparation for war. Indeed war itself is often a by-product of this preparation and of the circumstances which lead to preparation. Preparation for war is far more effective than war as an antidote against unemployment. War produces a more complete result but it is temporary, passes swiftly, and leaves behind it immense dislocations. But preparation for war can go on for a long time—for forty years in Germany and France and Italy. War or preparation for war establishes the government as the one big customer for the one big industry to which almost all industries become tributary: the armament industry. Preparation for war—national defense, it is called—can take a million or more men in this country in peacetime out of the labor market and put them in the army while at the same time three times as many can be drawn into the industries which provide them with tanks, planes, guns, barracks, food, clothes, etc., all paid for by the government with funds raised largely if not altogether by debt.

Just a brief comment: these few lines explain, much better than anything else, why ‘the Left™’ consistently favours such policies: because it enlarges ‘the state’ and thus advances the left-wing aims.

One more snippet from Flynn to drive home that point:

War as an economic instrument is possible because it is possible to work up a moral support for war—or for national defense. War produces its economic effects wholly by sending the government off upon a gigantic spree of spending borrowed funds. It would be possible to obtain the same effects by spending borrowed funds on any other sort of project. But there is, as yet, no project behind which the necessary moral energy can be generated.

Next up, the EU level—and here, the utter depravity of our time is obvious, as a recent 'strategy' paper by EDIS clearly states:

The EDIS lays out a vision for a European defence industrial policy up to 2035, and announces actions that bolster the EDTIB [European defence technological and industrial base] through ‘increased, more collaborative and European investment from Member States’; strengthen the European defence industry’s ability to respond quickly and adapt to any situation; mainstream a culture of defence readiness across all EU policies; and join forces with the EU’s global, like-minded, and strategic partners.

Breaking both the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties (the EU’s ‘primary law’), which both forbid joint EU funding of weapons, militarisation and its accoutrements—there are no weapons deals without corruption—are now both normalised and institutionalised across the EU bloc (which is run by lunatic crooks).

EU Commission Declares War 'Sustainable'

Finally, let’s also mention the issue of those affected (not the loony crooks in charge): how will that end?

As some of you may know, I’m also doing a second Substack about the vintage postcard collection of my grandfather, Erich Sonntag (1922-88).

My grandfather was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941 and spent 2.5 years on the Eastern Front (summer 1942 through Dec. 1944), and while he was among the few survivors of ‘his’ unit—which was ‘almost totally annihilated’ in November 1943 (as he put it in his memoirs), he returned from the war a heavily traumatised man who was suffering from what must have been horrible nightmares until the end of his life.

And he wrote fiction—both prose and poetry—about the war, and since it’s appropriate, I shall conclude this—fittingly, Good Friday—posting with a poem he wrote:

‘The Black Veil’, a Poem by Erich Sonntag

Do you hear the rumbling
all around?
Do you hear the whisper
from deep gorges?

Don’t you feel
the breath of Death,
cold and full of dread,
in your face?

Do you feel the passion
in your heart,
a passionate yearning
of raging anguish?

Can you hear the music
of the organ?
In excruciating hours
a heart breaks in two.

Do you hear the song?
It soundeth from afar.
It is the great lament
of war and suffering.

My grandaunt (1918-2019) passed a few photographs to my aunt, and among them, the below picture—which I’m reproducing as an illustration—is found.

On the reverse, a few indications are given:

2 April 1942, Smolensk, before the burial of our comrades-in-arms

This is, by the way, why I know Erich Sonntag was not there: he deployed to the Eastern Front on 29 July 1942 (from Vienna) and his unit arrived in Orel, Russia, on 4 Aug. 1942 (imagine that kind of railroad travel-time); his ‘baptism of fire’ occurred on 11 Aug. 1942.

This is my translation, if you wish to read the German original, please venture over to my postcard weblog, which also features a second poem by Erich Sonntag (posted on the occasion of Armistice Day in 2024):

Armistice Day 2024

May the dead rest in peace, that is, until they rise again.