A designer based in Selby, Yorkshire has been blasted for selling Nazi products including Zyklon-B themed T-shirts and cups.
The sick products themed after the gas which killed millions of Jews in the Holocaust featured on the Internet site Redbubble, a global online marketplace for print-on-demand products, which has its headquarters in Melbourne in Australia and officers in the German capital of Berlin and in San Francisco in the US state of California.
The platform, which boasts having 700,000 artists creating designs to be sold to an ever growing client base, includes design firm ‘ImperivmCloth’ from the British town of Selby in Yorkshire which is behind the Zyklon-B merchandise.
On the site, the designers describe themselves as: “Just a couple of guys, up to no good, starting to make trouble in your neighbourhood.”
And they boast about their Zyklon-B line of clothes by saying: “You too can look minty fresh with this beautiful Zyklon-B design.”
As well as coffee cups and T-shirts, they also offer mobile phone cases and postcards with the same logo.
They add: “We’re pretty new, but we’ll have more and more designs popping up all the time, so keep an eye out, and thanks for checking us out!”
Zyklon B was originally developed as a cyanide-based pesticide in Germany in the early 1920s, but was later used during the Holocaust to murder around a million people in gas chambers. The man that developed it, Bruno Tesch, was executed in 1946 for selling it to the SS knowing it was to be used on humans.
The logo they have chosen with white writing on a blue background is clearly similar to the Oral B one, a dental hygiene brand which is owned by Procter and Gamble.
The British designed-products were universally blasted in German media which took offence to the “disturbing Nazi products” being sold in Germany and other European countries on the Redbubble marketplace
Netizens were not too pleased either with the Zyklon-B merchandise.
Netizen ‘Thomas Fischer’ wrote: “The relatives and descendants of the people who were killed with Zyklon-B are surely laugh themselves silly over these articles.”
‘Ingrid Feistner’ wrote: “Interesting that Englishmen think they can make a lot of money with these products in Germany!”
Redbubble sparked a similar scandal last month when Auschwitz themed miniskirts and pillows with photos of the train tracks leading to the former Nazi concentration camp as well as the chimneys of the Auschwitz ovens were put online.
It was immediately slammed by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which released a statement which read: “Do you really think that selling such products as pillows, mini skirts or tote bags with the images of Auschwitz – a place of enormous human tragedy where over 1.1 million people were murdered – is acceptable?”
The Auschwitz-themed clothes were since removed from Redbubble with the company saying on Twitter that the designs were “not acceptable” and that “immediate action” was taken to remove them from sale.
The Zyklon-B themed products have been removed today [Monday] as well from Redbubble after the massive criticism.
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Story By: Michael Leidig, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
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