A German  bakery selling tank-riding and gun-weilding sugar bunnies ahead of Easter has sparked fury. Cafe Lieb in Tubingen decided to start making the confection again after discovering the dusty and unused World War Two moulds in the basement. One figure is a bunny astride a tank, others show rabbits operating an artillery gun and what appears to be an anti-aircraft gun. They would have been made during the war with sugar, cream and water.

Ulrich Buob, head confectioner at Cafe Lieb, told regional news outlet SWR: “Older people say they recognise them from their childhood, and many old people simply want to buy them as a souvenir.” He added that the bunnies are still applicable to the world today, with Germany looking to boost its military under the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

Hermann Leimgruber, the bakery owner, defended the controversial bunnies as tradition, saying that “one doesn’t have to turn everything into a scandal”.

“My God, it’s a part of our history,” he said. “You can’t negate it all, the children got the bunny in the tank at Easter, that’s the way it was.”

But despite the bakery saying the sugar bunnies are nostalgic for older people, there are those who feel they are glorifying Germany’s Nazi past.

Anti-war organisation the Information Centre on Militarisation has said that although being fluffy rabbits made of sugar, there is nothing cute about the confection.

Reza Schwarz, a member of the group in Tubingen, said: “I find it goes in the direction of trivialising, normalising militarism. It’s hankering after the good old war days and it makes a mockery of the people who suffered.”

One woman passing the stand said: “Easter is peace and not tanks, it doesn’t fit at all.” Another said: “As a mother I find it unacceptable, especially at a time like this.”

The newspaper Berliner Zeitung said that the bunnies were historically questionable and tasteless, calling them symptomatic of the modern age.

It said: “The Nazi past is transfigured into nostalgic confectionery. A tank like from the Second World War, nicely decorated and ready for Easter — as if it were all just a harmless gimmick.

“The militarisation of everyday life has long been in full swing. Bundeswehr advertisements on trams, camouflage popcorn containers in the cinema — war is creeping into our consciousness, not as a state of emergency but as part of normality. Or, worse still, as an entertaining accessory.”

Products that glorify the military are not well-favoured in Germany, which remains against having a large military due to its Nazi history.