Following the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Auschwitz Museum in Poland said on Wednesday it had asked the makers of the popular Pokemon Go augmented reality game to block players at the former Nazi death camp out of respect for the dead.
The mobile game, which involves collecting 250 cartoon "pocket monsters" by physically moving around in real life, has turned into a global sensation since appearing on July 5.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Washington, DC, museum said that “playing the game is not appropriate in the museum” and added that the museum was “trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.”
The Auschwitz Museum in Poland followed suit on Wednesday, telling AFP it had asked the studio Niantic Labs, which developed the game, to remove Auschwitz from the application's possible locations.
"We find this kind of activity inappropriate. It's here that hundreds of thousands of people suffered: Jews, Poles, Roma, Russians and individuals from other nations," museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told the news agency.
"Generally speaking, we want to raise awareness among game developers regarding respect for the memory of the victims of this largest Nazi death camp from World War II," he added.
One million European Jews died at the camp set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in 1940-1945.
More than 100,000 others, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the museum.
A record 1.72 million people visited the site in the southern city of Oswiecim in 2015, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Soviets.
The wild success of the online game -- owned by Nintendo subsidiary the Pokemon Company and developed by studio Niantic Labs -- had already seen the Japanese game-maker's stock price rocket by 59 percent in four days by Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), called on the public to respect Auschwitz and refrain from playing the game at the site.
“I visited #Auschwitz today. Its [sic] a sacred space. Don't debase it with a mindless video game,” he tweeted.