A German store accidentally sold cups decorated with a photograph of Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany who brought about the Holocaust, the Daily Mail reported.
Employees at the Zurbrueggen home improvement store in Bielefeld did not immediately notice the picture of the Nazi leader, which is surrounded by pink flowers and lines of poetry on the cup. Hitler's picture appears to be from the image of a stamp with a swastika postmark, the newspaper reported.
The store sold 175 of the cups for less than 3 pounds, $5, each before they noticed Hitler's picture. Selling anything with a picture of the infamous Fuehrer on it is illegal in present-day Germany. Hitler rose to power in the 1930s and oversaw the persecution and deaths of millions of Jews, whom he believed were inferior to the German "race."
"I thought I wasn't seeing too well when I saw I had Hitler sitting down to breakfast with me," Agner Teewald, who bought one of the cups to drink her morning coffee out of, said according to the Daily Mail.
The store said it was a "pretty stupid amalgam of unfortunate circumstances," that led to the cups being sold. The cups were placed on the store shelves so fast that employees did not notice the image, Christian Zurbrueggen, the store's owner, said according to the newspaper.
The cups sold were part of a batch of 5,000 that were made in a factory in China. Zurbrueggen said an investigation is underway to determine how Hitler's picture ended up on the cups. The rest of the 4,825 cups have been destroyed.
The incident was a "truly terrible" mistake, Zurbrueggen said, the Daily Mail reported.
The Chinese factory also apologized and said it will also launch an investigation.
The store is offering customers a 15 pound, $25, voucher to any of the 175 customers who return the cups they bought, the Daily Mail reported.
See pictures of the cup decorated with Hitler's picture here.
