“Final Victory / World Champions 2014”; a Nazi cross topples Rio’s Christ the Redeemer
 
The combination of Argentina and Germany surely put the subject of World War II in the minds of some onlookers—it turns out that not all of them were outside of Germany. After Germany’s impressive 1-0 victory over Argentina on Sunday, “Unbekannt” (Unknown) has produced Nazi-themed T-shirts to mark the great victory of “Die Mannschaft” (“The Team”—as the German national team is often called).

The iconography is unmistakable, but in order to help with the vocabulary: we all know what “Blitzkrieg” means—the term “Blitzsieg” punningly replaces the word for “war” (Krieg) with the far more innocuous yet in this context still somewhat sinister word for “victory” (Sieg). “Endsieg” means “Final Victory”—as Wikipedia points out, “The term is today almost exclusively used with reference to its meaning in the Third Reich.” (In other words, the use of the word can’t be brushed aside as a reference to the referee’s final whistle or some such.) That Wikipedia entry is worth reading in full, as it points out the complex uses such a term is put to in the present day, many of them sarcastic; Germans are far too aware of their loaded history to throw around such a term lightly. The German word for “World Champion(s)” is “Weltmeister.”

As of this writing, those shirts are still available on Amazon.de. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for Amazon.de to pull them and issue an inevitable apology.
 

“Germany Brazil 7-1 Lightning Victory”
 

“Blitzkrieg / Victory 2014 / Germany World Champions”
 

 
via Kraftfuttermischwerk