Auschwitz Memorial criticizes WWE for using image of concentration camp in promotion

The Auschwitz Memorial criticized World Wrestling Entertainment on Wednesday for its use of a photo of the Holocaust concentration camp as part of a promotional video for its biggest wrestling event of the year. 

The image was used in a promotional clip prior to a father-son match Saturday between wrestlers Rey Mysterio and Dominik Mysterio on the first day of WrestleMania 39 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.

“The fact that Auschwitz image was used to promote a WWE match is hard to call ‘an editing mistake,'” the Auschwitz Memorial said in a tweet Wednesday alongside a screenshot of the image used. “Exploiting the site that became a symbol of enormous human tragedy is shameless and insults the memory of all victims of Auschwitz.”

The storyline of the video involves Dominik trying to convince his father to fight him. In the video, Dominick says that he served “hard time” in prison, as images of barbed wire and jails flash across the screen — one of which appears to be of Auschwitz, where more than one million people were tortured and murdered during World War II. 

The WWE has not commented on the controversy, but the image does not appear in the current YouTube version of Saturday’s Wrestlemania kickoff show.

Auschwitz, which was built in Poland in 1940, was the largest of Germany’s Nazi concentration camps, imprisoning mainly Polish citizens and people of the Jewish faith until 1945.

About six million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators as part of a systematic effort to exterminate people of the Jewish faith. Millions of others were also killed by the Nazi regime. An estimated 1.1 million people were killed in Auschwitz, according to the Auschwitz Memorial.