A 17-year-old Israeli teenager performed gestures of the Nazi salute in front of the Auschwitz German death camp’s main gate with the inscription “Arbeit Macht Frei”. The young man was detained and was presented with a criminal charge for promoting Nazism. According to the police, the boy was already punished for his offence.

A spokesperson for the local police Małgorzata Jurecka said that day before, museum guards spotted a young man performing a Nazi in front of the main gate at the former Auschwitz I camp. He was detained and handed over to the police. 

The Oświęcim District Prosecutor’s Office was notified of the case.

“Police officers collected evidence of the teenager’s behaviour. Later that afternoon he heard a charge of promoting Nazism. Such an offence is punished by a fine, restriction of liberty or up to two years in prison. The teenager pleaded guilty to the charge and voluntarily surrendered to the punishment. A fine has been imposed on him,” said Małgorzata Jurecka.

The Auschwitz I was a Nazi German death camp aimed at exterminating the members of Polish intellectual elite, scouts and other members of anti-Nazi resistance in Poland. Some 200,000 were incarcerated in the camp and 70,000 killed, which makes Poles the second nationality of both prisoners and victims of Auschwitz. 

Another death camp created at the site, called the Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the site of mass genocide of mostly European Jews, of whom more than 1 million were killed in gas chambers and through slave labour. 

Source: PAP

Photo: @AFpost

Tomasz Modrzejewski