NY magazine first reported Tuesday that some users of the Nintendo game, which allows players to capture its animated creatures on their phones at outdoor sites and buildings with the help of phone GPS systems, were playing at Auschwitz. In a statement, communications director for the Holocaust museum Andrew Hollinger said playing the game inside a memorial to victims of the Nazi regime was “extremely inappropriate”.
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“Technology can be an important learning tool, but this game falls far outside of our educational and memorial mission”.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is understandably a little ticked off about this, and has banned visitors from searching the augmented reality world of Pokemon while visiting the memorial, according to The Daily Beast.
In one case, a player claimed to have found a Koffing at the Holocaust museum.
“These aren’t recreational sites, these are monuments to mass murder”, said Greenblatt.
The app has also led to crimes, where victims have been unwittingly lured to locations.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum told the Washington Post it was looking to be removed from the game. Pokemon are making appearances in all sorts of unusual places, from people’s places of employment to churches, police stations and even museums.
The runaway success of Pokemon Go is at this point not up for debate, the developers are making fat stacks of cash and it’s become the new “it” thing to talk about all over social media. However, some sites have posted instructions for obtaining the game in countries outside of the US, Australia or New Zealand, where it is available.
After we were made aware that a number of historical markers on the grounds of former concentration camps in Germany had been added, we determined that they did not meet the spirit of our guidelines and began the process of removing them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
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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.
