Exactly a week ago today, Spanish fashion house Loewe got their asses handed to them for releasing an outfit that looked basically identical to the uniforms that were given to prisoners in concentration camps. I’m afraid it’s time to reset the “days since someone last tried to make money off the Holocaust” counter back to zero, because Amazon has just had to pull some Auschwitz themed Christmas decorations.
If you did a double take like I did when I first read the words “Auschwitz themed Christmas decorations”, then I’m sorry to tell you that you didn’t read it wrong. The official Auschwitz Museum Twitter page were the ones that had to point it out, and tweeted that Christmas ornaments and bottle openers decorated with pictures of Auschwitz were, to put it mildly, disrespectful.
To put it less mildly, they’re super f*cked up.
They asked Amazon to remove the decorations, and Amazon did actually do that a couple of hours later. Screenshots are forever though.
There is a chance that the decorations weren’t deliberately made, but was the unfortunate result of an algorithm that was set up to grab pictures and put them on generic ornaments. Algorithms like those do exist, and once somebody orders one the product is made rather than selling products that already exist. Nobody is quite sure if that’s the case yet, but I’m personally hoping it is – just to keep some of the faith I have left in humanity.
Ultimately the result was the same no matter how these ads were made. Concentration camps were one of the darkest points in human history, and do not belong on cheery Christmas decorations. They never should have been advertised in the first place.
I’m hoping more than anything that we don’t see another one of these stories next week.