Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has banned people from playing Pokémon Go on their smartphones during visits to the former death camp. The game was the most downloaded free app on Apple’s app store, while Nintendo shares surged almost 25 percent on Monday for their biggest daily gains ever based on its success.
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“Allowing such games to be active on the site of Auschwitz Memorial is disrespectful to the memory of the victims of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp on many levels”, Pawel Sawicki said in an email. The museum’s communications director, Andy Holliger, said that they are “attempting to have the museum removed from the game”.
A woman points her smart phone at the Brandenburg Gate as she plays the Pokemon Go mobile game in Berlin on July 13, 2016.
The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US want Niantic Labs, the maker of Pokemon Go, to take the two sites off the augmented reality app used by players to hunt cartoon creatures, reported USA Today.
The game’s developer, Niantic, ran into similar trouble previous year when one of its games, Ingress, allowed players to battle for control over real-life locations that happened to include multiple former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.
It is also reported to be a Pokestop, meaning players can collect items including Pokemon snacks and medicine.
Others soon took to Twitter to report finding Pokémon at the popular memorial in Oswiecim, Poland, but their screenshots of game activity did not match the normal look of the game.
The monster, which emits poisonous gas, was seen in the room alongside the testimony of survivors of Nazi concentration camps where millions of Jews died in gas chambers.
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According to the research firm SimilarWeb, the game was downloaded in more than five percent of Android phones in the first two days of release and had outpaced the dating app Tinder.
