Auschwitz Memorial urges Amazon to stop selling 'virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda'

The Auschwitz Memorial has called on Amazon to stop selling books it describes as "hateful, virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda".

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during his news conference at the National Press Club in Washington. On Monday, 4 February, 2020.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during his news conference at the National Press Club in Washington. On Monday, 4 February, 2020. Source: AAP

The Auschwitz Memorial called Friday on US e-commerce billionaire Jeff Bezos to remove Nazi era anti-Semitic children's books featured on his Amazon global digital sales platform.

"Hateful, virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda is available for sale not only on @AmazonUK," the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted on its official account.

"Books by authors like Julius Streicher can be found also on @amazon & @AmazonDE. Such books should be removed immediately," it said in a post that also featured screen-grabs of the books for sale on the platform.
It came after the UK-based Holocaust Educational Trust tweeted a similar message from its account: "Nazi propaganda has no place on the electronic bookshelves of our country".

Among the books both parties want to see removed is a children's book titled The Poisonous Mushroom, authored by Nazi party member Julius Streicher and originally published in 1938.

The book is offered on Amazon for sale in its original German (Der Giftpilz) as well as English, French and Spanish, AFP confirmed with an online search.

Last year, Lithuania called on Amazon to stop selling Soviet-themed goods online, saying the hammer and sickle symbol offended victims of totalitarian communism.

Over the last 18 months Amazon has pulled several books by far-right authors including David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, according to the New York Times.
Amazon also banned other books that were anti-Semitic in nature, the NYT reported earlier this month.

Holocaust survivors returned last month to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to mark 75 years since its liberation and to sound the alarm over a surge in anti-Semitic attacks on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them deadly.

Operated by Nazi Germany from 1940 until 1945 in then occupied Poland, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of camps across Europe set up as part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.

Nazi Germany killed more than 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jewish.


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Published 22 February 2020 6:07pm
Updated 22 February 2020 6:14pm
Source: AFP, SBS


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