BERLIN, July 3: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi expressed regrets to Germany on Thursday over a Nazi slur that has reopened painful wounds and underlined an excruciating sensitivity about its past.

After a telephone conversation between them, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Mr Berlusconi had “expressed his regrets about his choice of expression and the comparison. I told him that for me the incident was closed”.

“The rest has to be worked out at the European parliament,” Mr Schroeder said.

On Wednesday, under heckling by the German MEP Martin Schulz, Mr Berlusconi shot back: “A producer is now shooting a film about the Nazi concentration camps. I propose you to play the role of Capo.”

A Capo was chosen by the Nazi SS from camp detainees and was often given monitoring or guard duties.

Speaking to parliament earlier on Thursday, Mr Schroeder had called the remark “totally unacceptable” and, to loud applause, said he expected the Italian prime minister “formally to apologize”.

Mr Berlusconi’s jibe has given Germany another unwelcome jolt about its past, an era that remains a potent, volatile and highly sensitive subject in the European giant.

Generations of children have had the crimes of the Nazis drummed into them. Concentration camps have been turned into powerful monuments against terror. Hardly a day goes by without a reminder, on television, at the theatre or in the press, of the evils of Hitler’s dictatorship.

Haunting memories of the past have coloured anguished debates over German troop deployments overseas, and more recently influenced the fierce opposition to US military action in Iraq.

And more than half a century after World War II ended, comparisons between the Nazis and today’s society always cause a fuss.

German parliament speaker Wolfgang Thierse called Berlusconi’s comment “a crude mistake.”

“No democratic politician should be allowed to take a dispute with another democratic politician so far as to dishonour him with a Nazi comparison,” he told ARD public television.

The MEP, Martin Schulz, said he was “very surprised” that the premier of a country once ruled by Hitler’s fascist ally Mussolini could talk like that.

“Normally it’s a cause for resignation,” he said.

“Germany’s whole political culture is shaped by its rejection of the Third Reich,” said Etienne Francois, a history professor at the Technical University in Berlin. Thus, those who make a Nazi reference are invariably asked to resign.

Schroeder last year apologised and replaced his justice minister after she likened US President George W. Bush’s tactics on Iraq to those of Hitler.

In December, Roland Koch, a conservative state premier tipped as a future chancellor, was forced publicly to apologise for drawing a parallel between a mooted wealth tax and the way Nazis stigmatized Jews with a yellow star.

Earlier in 2002, conservative former chancellor Helmut Kohl was accused of describing Thierse as the worst parliament speaker since Hitler ally Hermann Goering.

The centrist Free Democrats also got into trouble when its deputy leader fired off a campaign leaflet criticising Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and revisiting an old row with a prominent German Jewish leader.

Sabine von Oppeln, a politics professor at Berlin’s Free University, said German politicians were under “special scrutiny”. —AFP