From the BBC:
“Auschwitz: Dutch tourist
fined over Nazi salute at former death camp”
A Dutch tourist has been detained
in Poland for giving the Nazi salute at the site of the former
Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, local police say. The 29-year-old woman made the
gesture in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) gate. The woman
- who has not been named - was later charged with engaging in Nazi propaganda.
Prosecutors issued a fine, which she agreed to pay. The woman said the act had
been a bad joke, Poland's PAP news agency reports. She had been posing for a
photo taken by her husband at the time. It is not the first time foreigners
have been detained for promoting Nazi propaganda in Poland - a charge that can
carry up to two years in prison. In 2013, two Turkish students were each
sentenced to six months in jail, suspended for three years, and fined for a
similar Nazi salute at Auschwitz. Nazi Germany built the death camp in the
southern Polish town of Oswiecim after occupying Poland at the start of World
War Two in 1939.
In just over four-and-a-half
years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at
Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews. Those deported to the camp complex
were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments.
The vast majority were murdered in the complex of gas chambers at the Auschwitz
II-Birkenau camp. Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi
campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. Auschwitz was at the centre
of that genocide. Soviet troops liberated the camp in early 1945.
^ This may seem like an innocent
joke until you stop and think that 1.1 million men, women and children were
murdered at that site and those that weren’t murdered were tortured and abused
for years. ^
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