Germany can’t get anything right. There were the World Wars, for starters, and more recently their diehard climate fanatics shut down clean nuclear power, only later realizing that meant Russia would dictate if they got heat or not in the winter. Germany is just…Germany.
Now, in addition to living with the legacy of 20th century murder camps, their KFC brand sent out a horribly insensitive message to anyone who had their app. In what appears to be a case where a day of remembrance was treated as a holiday – that’s assuming positive intentions, at least – KFC Germany shared this appalling exhortation:
“Commemorate Kristallnacht – treat yourself to more soft cheese and crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”
Just yikes.
As Wikipedia writes, and as anyone versed in basic history knows, the events of November 1938 were just one of countless acts of anti-Jewish violence under Hitler’s Nazi Germany: It is widely seen, as Wikipeda says, as a “prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.” Wikipedia continues:
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass…was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (literally ‘Crystal Night’) comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed.
The Daily Wire reported that backlash was immense and that KFC Germasny quickly apologized for the error.
The company received backlash for its message, but about an hour later, an additional alert was sent out, which included an apology.
“We are very sorry, we will check our internal processes immediately so that this does not happen again. Please excuse this error,” the message said, according to the Bild newspaper via BBC.
Bild said the error was “tasteless” and called it “fast-food advertising at the cost of the remembrance of the victims of the Nazi regime.”
There are so many questions as to how this happens. The excuse was that the app is linked to a calendar which has significant dates of all kinds plugged into. But someone still had to write the message, right? And a company this size most certainly has a marketing team whose job it requires the writing, review, and final publication of content. It seems almost impossible to the casual observer that this could happen by accident.
Germans, of all people, would know what happened during Kristallnacht and would have to immediately get a sense something was amiss.
Also, according to the Daily Wire, it took an hour to send a second message. An hour?! Regardless, there don’t seem to be any lingering outrages, at least on a corporate media or political level. The backlash will remain but it won’t go anywhere.
It’s always worth entertaining the counterfactuals in this case, though. Imagine if a conservative American company tweeted out something by accident about commemorating the Dred Scot decision, which infamously stated blacks were not people but instead property. How would that be received? Would there be grace for a mistake?
We all know the answer to that.
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