Amazon pulls ‘disturbing’ Christmas ornaments bearing images of Auschwitz

A Polish museum has criticised US e-commerce giant Amazon for selling Christmas ornaments decorated with images of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The museum at the site of the former camp in southern Poland tweeted screenshots of the items showing train tracks and barracks and requested that Amazon remove them from their site.

“Selling ‘Christmas ornaments’ with images of Auschwitz does not seem appropriate. Auschwitz on a bottle opener is rather disturbing and disrespectful,” the museum tweeted.

It added later that Amazon appeared to have removed the items – but then posted a follow-up saying it had discovered others.

Those include a “disturbing” mousepad and a ceramic Christmas ornament with a freight car used for deporting Jews for extermination.

An Amazon spokesperson told Metro newspaper: “All sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who do not will be subject to action, including potential removal of their account. ‘The products in question have been removed.”

Nazi Germany set up the death camp after occupying Poland during the second world war.

The Holocaust site has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jews, with one million killed at the camp between 1940 to 1945. More than 100,000 non-Jews also died there, according to the museum. An estimated 232,000 of the victims were children.