WWE apologizes for using footage of Auschwitz in a WrestleMania promo

WWE apologizes for showing photo of Auschwitz in WrestleMania video - The Washington Post

Before an anticipated father-son match last week, WWE aired staged footage of Dominik Mysterio being arrested in December after shoving his father, Rey.

Then, the video transitioned to a photo of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where more than a million people were killed during the Holocaust.

Auschwitz Memorial condemned the footage Wednesday on Twitter.

“The fact that [an] Auschwitz image was used to promote a WWE match is hard to call ‘an editing mistake,’” the tweet stated. “Exploiting the site that became a symbol of enormous human tragedy is shameless and insults the memory of all victims of Auschwitz.”

WWE replaced the image of Auschwitz with generic footage of barbed wire on later airings and reruns. In a statement to The Washington Post, a WWE spokesman apologized, calling the footage an error.

“We had no knowledge of what was depicted,” the statement said. “As soon as we learned, it was removed immediately.”

Holocaust experts said the imagery might have caused trauma for some survivors.

“Using imagery associated with the Holocaust for essentially what is kind of entertainment purposes can be seen as minimizing what happened and failing to recognize how horrific it was,” Natalie Belsky, a history professor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, told The Post.

The video was shown on the streaming service Peacock before a WrestleMania match that had been teased since the fall. In September, Dominik turned against Rey in a scripted storyline by clotheslining him at a WWE event in Wales.

The storyline continued in November, when Dominik and his on-screen girlfriend, Rhea Ripley, attacked Rey on Thanksgiving. On Christmas Eve, Dominik shoved Rey and was handcuffed and placed in a police vehicle in a scripted act that WWE promoted on social media.

Dominik and Rey were set to settle their differences Saturday at WrestleMania, WWE’s biggest event, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.

In Saturday’s match, Rey, 48, defeated Dominik, 26, with a kick to his face. More than 160,000 spectators attended WrestleMania, according to SoFi Stadium, and Peacock enjoyed one of its best streaming weekends ever, Deadline reported.

During the preview for the show, the footage of Auschwitz flashed across the screen for a moment.

Germans built Auschwitz in occupied Poland in 1940, and it became one of the largest concentration camps during World War II. Around 1.1 million people— mostly Jews — died there as part of the Nazi’s extermination plans. About 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, but the camp’s site was preserved as a reminder of the tragedy.

“That imagery associated with Nazism, the Nazi genocide, Auschwitz specifically and other concentration camps should be kept within context,” said Brett Ashley Kaplan, who directs the University of Illinois’s Holocaust, genocide and memory studies initiative. “So they should be understood within their historical and also, frankly, their emotional context.”

Mehnaz Afridi, the director of Manhattan College’s Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center, echoed that sentiment.

“What they’re using to garner support is kind of very offensive, especially to people who were in the death camps,” Afridi said. “But also it should be offensive to all of us. I mean, we’re using a death camp to rally people around a fight.”

Auschwitz Memorial continued discussing WWE’s Auschwitz photo on Thursday, writing on Twitter that some victims at the concentration camp were forced to wrestle for officers to watch.

“Some could practice wrestling, boxing, football, basketball & more - often as entertainment for SS guards,” Auschwitz Memorial said in a tweet. “Remember them with us.”