GENEVA, September 11, 2008 (AFP) - Liechtenstein's Prince Hans-Adam II was accused Thursday of trivialising Nazi crimes by suggesting that Germany today is a 'fourth reich,' Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reported.

Prince Hans-Adam, 63, made his provocative remarks in a letter to the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin in which he refused to allow one of his paintings to be loaned to the museum.

Bilateral relations have been tense since a tax scandal erupted in February when Germany launched an investigation using documents allegedly stolen from the principality's LGT bank by a former employee.

'We are waiting for better times in German-Liechtenstein relations,' the prince wrote in his letter, dated June 24 and reproduced in the Tages-Anzeiger on Thursday.

'In the past 200 years, we have already outlived three German Reichs, and I hope we will also outlive a fourth one,' he said.

Salomon Korn of the Central Jewish Council in Germany told the Tages-Anzeiger that the prince's remarks were 'totally absurd'.

'The prince belittles the crimes of the Nazis by putting the (current) Federal Republic on the same level as the Third Reich,' the 1933-45 period when dictator Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were in power, he said.