‘Unacceptable’: Dutch woman pleads guilty to promoting Nazism at Auschwitz
A Dutch woman has pleaded guilty to promoting Nazism after she made a Nazi salute at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death under Hitler’s reign.
Local police in a statement Monday said that the 29-year-old tourist, who was not publicly identified, was arrested Sunday after her husband, 30, took photos of her making the salute in front of the notorious gate, which reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” CNN reported Monday.
The “ill-considered joke,” as the woman deemed it, was reported by Auschwitz Museum guards and though she could have faced up to two years behind bars, the woman was merely fined, a police representative told the outlet.
The salute is “associated with terrible human suffering and filled with contempt and hatred,” a representative for the museum told CNN in a statement.
“While it should not be present at all in the public space, using it at the site of the former camp is unacceptable,” read the statement. “It is disrespectful to all victims of the camp.”
Six million Jews died during the Holocaust and more than 1.1 million people were systematically killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is now a museum and memorial site.
The museum representative said they hoped the guards’ reaction would serve as “a warning” to anyone looking to make “such shameful manifestations” at the memorial.
“We cannot dismiss this as a bad joke,” Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, told CNN. “Even a symbolic fine is a message for others.”
