The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum has blasted a Polish company for selling socks with the image of Adolf Hitler on them.
The Museum posted an image on Twitter of a screenshot from the Nanushki website. They commented in Polish that it was difficult for them to find the words to describe how they felt about this product.
The Museum is dedicated to maintaining the site of the Nazi’s Auschwitz concentration camp. They derided the company for using the image of one of history’s most notorious criminals in their marketing campaign.
The socks were initially posted on the Nanushki site with the name “Adolf.” The description stated they were designed to “bring order in the socks drawer.” Since the tweet by the Museum, the company has re-listed the socks as “Patrick.” They now describe the image of the person on the socks as a businessman who likes cars and is recognizable by his clothing.
The socks first showed up on Nanushki’s site in October of 2016. It is not known when they first were available for sale or when the name of the socks was changed.
In a statement to the Mirror newspaper, the company said the socks were intended to mock Hitler in a “comic way.” The company stated they felt that people should keep a bit of distance from the world. They acknowledged that the war was a terrible event in human history but felt their socks were not likely to change the fate of the world in any meaningful way.
Nanushki said in their statement that they were surprised by the attention generated by a pair of socks and that people could take socks in such a “negative and totally mistaken way.”
They went on to say that they sincerely apologized to anyone who was offended and that they had changed the name on the socks because they found no reason to keep it when it was clear that it was offending people.
The socks feature the image of a man with black hair and a black “toothbrush” style mustache.
The description for the “Patrick” socks states the character “does not like to talk about his past.” He is now described as a “broker, financier, businessman, and philanthropist.”
The previous description for the “Adolf” socks described him as a “clever strategist and a born leader.”
Adolf Hitler was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was a dictator and the leader of the Nazi Party. Under his leadership, Germany performed countless atrocities in the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews and 5 million other civilians were rounded up in concentration camps and murdered. His actions led directly to WWII in which an estimated 22-30 million soldiers were killed in battle, prison camps, accidents, and diseases. It is further estimated that an additional 19-25 million civilians were killed by disease or famine, related to the war.
In all, approximately 3% of the world’s population was exterminated due to the actions of this one man.
Hitler died on April 30, 1945, by committing suicide in his bunker while Allied forces were taking over Berlin.
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