PARIS — The labels on Swiss mini-cream containers tend toward the pastoral and cuddly, with pleasant images of Alpine landscapes and locomotives, or dogs and cats. So it was something of a shock to one consumer at a Swiss train station to find the face of Hitler staring back at him when he reached to lighten his morning coffee.

Migros, a Swiss retail giant, said it did not know exactly how the image came to be on the label. But it offered its apologies Wednesday for the “unforgivable incident” and withdrew about 2,000 containers, some of which also featured the face of Mussolini, from about 100 cafes in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

Tristan Cerf, a spokesman for Migros, said by telephone from Lausanne on Wednesday that the company had been horrified by the failure of its internal controls to detect the images on its cream containers.

He said the problem had come to Migros’s attention after a customer drinking coffee at the Baden train station was startled by the discovery and sent a photo of the label to the newspaper 20 Minutes.