An Indonesia museum’s Adolf Hitler statue was finally removed after complaints the waxwork figure glorified anti-Semitism. The museum had wanted to keep the selfie magnet, saying visitors liked it.
The life-size sculpture, one of about 80 in the museum, stood for three years at The De Mata Trick Eye Museum in Yogyakarta, Newsweek reported.
Behind the Nazi dictator’s figure was a backdrop depicting the Auschwitz concentration camp, with the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” — “work sets you free” — inscribed above the camp’s front gates.
It is believed that more than one million people, including 960,000 Jews, died at Auschwitz during Hitler’s regime, but this didn’t stop countless visitors to the museum from taking a selfie with the statue.
On Friday the museum took down the waxwork in response to outrage ignited over these photos.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wisenthal Center, an organization that campaigns against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, said that everything about the wax statue was wrong.
“It’s hard to find words for how contemptible it is,” he said, per The Independent. “The background is disgusting. It mocks the victims who went in and never came out.”
The museum initially defended the display by saying no visitors had complained, adding that the waxwork was “one of the favourite figures for our visitors to take selfies with.”
However, the museum’s operations manager, Jamie Misbah, later said per the New York Daily News, “We don’t want to attract outrage.”
Indonesian researcher at Human Rights Watch, Andreas Harsono, has since confirmed per Newsweek that the statue was removed, noting that it was a welcome decision because “regardless of the intention, depicting Hitler as if he were a respected figure is in bad taste.”
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