‘Stupid joke’ at Nazi death camp Auschwitz lands tourist in trouble
Regional police said a woman was detained on Sunday after performing a Nazi salute outside the iconic ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work makes one free’) entrance gate of the former Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp near the city of Oswiecim in southern Poland.
According to the PAP news agency, the tourist was posing for a photo taken by her husband. The woman pleaded guilty and was fined.
“She explained that it was a stupid joke,” regional police spokesperson Bartosz Izdebski said.
In 2013, two Turkish students were each fined and sentenced to six months in jail, suspended for three years, for similarly performing a Nazi salute outside the former camp’s main gate.
The Auschwitz camp complex, set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in January 1945.
Around a million Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were killed in Auschwitz, mostly in its gas chambers, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, in Jerusalem.
