You are here
Home > News > Dutch woman fined for Nazi salute at Auschwitz gate

Dutch woman fined for Nazi salute at Auschwitz gate

Andrzej Grygiel/PAP

A 29-year-old Dutch woman was slapped with a fine on Sunday for giving a Nazi salute while posing for a photo in front of the gates to Auschwitz.

The camp’s security guards detained the woman and called the police in the early afternoon on Sunday. The woman and her 30-year-old husband, who took the photo of her performing the salute, were both taken to a local police station.

Later in the afternoon, the local prosecutor’s office issued a fine, which she accepted.

“She said it was a stupid joke,” a spokesman for local police has told PAP.

Anybody convicted of promoting fascism can be punished with up to two years in prison, under Polish law.

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.

Built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in 1940, the Auschwitz death camp was first used to imprison Poles, but later on became the symbol of the Holocaust. Some 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, lost their lives in the camp, which remained active throughout most of WWII.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Top