BRUSSELS (EJP)---The Jewish community as well as former deportees and resistance groups in Belgium reacted with dismay at a television culinary program to be aired next week which features “Adolf Hitler’s favorite meal”.
In this program called "Plat préféré" (Favorite Dish) on the VRT Flemish tv station, cook Jeroen Meus goes to Hitler's haunts in Bavaria, southern Germany, to prepare trout with butter sauce which is said to be one of his favorite meals.
The tv's website called it "a succulent festive eal."
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Jan Stevens, director of Canvas television, part of the VRT station broadcasting the program, said it would help people to "have a better understanding of the dictator".
"It is not in any way trying to humanise Hitler. Stevens said, that VRT did wish to "apologise in advance if some people feel shocked by the programme's contents."
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Michael Freilich, chief editor of Joods Actueel, the magazine of the Jewish community in Antwerp, criticized the program saying "it is worrying to see that Hitler is turned into a banal figure, especially for the younger generation."
He denounced the "naivety" of Jeroen Meus who, he said, doesn’t realize the emotional and historical weight of the Holocaust for those who survived Nazism.
He stressed that neo-Nazi websites are now promoting the tv program and that Meus "has become their hero".
In a reaction, the VRT public station said it was not its intention “to make Hitler more humane but rather to put him in the right context."