Basil Fawlty would approve. Newsweek may have put an unflattering picture of Angela Merkel on the front cover this week with the word ACHTUNG! next to it, and described her advisers as "blond", possessing "Germanic features" and from the same "gene pool", but at least they don't (explicitly) mention the war. Unlike the story in Tuesday's Daily Mail about Germany's air traffic control buying a stake in our National Air Traffic Services, which begins with an inevitable reference to the Luftwaffe and the heroism of The Few.

It seems when times get tough between Germany and the UK, we can't help but cast our minds back to the second world war and indulge in some light goosestepping – the most notorious example being the Mirror's front page with its headline "Achtung! Surrender!" and the strapline "For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over".

Dr Falco Pfalzgraf, acting deputy director of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, says the war has always been a way to score an easy point about Germany, but also reflects British insecurities: "Britain was a superpower before the war but since it ended Germany has grown stronger and stronger."

But he adds, in the past five years things have got better, with the 2006 World Cup, which Germany hosted, changing people's image of the country. Optimistically, an article on the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle website agrees that while the UK papers have mentioned the fourth Reich and the war: "Such fervent anti-German sentiment is not considered to be deep-rooted in the general British public."

But perhaps that's because the German media haven't exactly been innocent of xenophobia themselves – back in February German magazine Focus caused outrage in Greece when it used a picture of a statue of the goddess Aphrodite flicking her middle finger at the viewer. The Greek government was so furious the German ambassador was summoned to explain.