Amazon, which sells nearly everything under the sun, has a new specialty item that has raised eyebrows – and ire – among many in thew Jewish community: A puzzle of the Dachau concentration camp.
The $24.99 232 piece puzzle is recommended for children eight years and older, the product description at the site says. The puzzle is listed in the toys section of the site. In the puzzle, two of the ovens the Nazis used to burn Jews and others to be killed in the death camp.
The puzzle is available on many Amazon sites, but not the German one, because of laws in Germany against misusing imagery of the Holocaust. Gerda Hasselfeldt, head of the Conservative Party in Germany, decried the sale of the puzzle. In a letter to Amazon, Hasselfeldt, a former government minister and vice-president of the German Bundestag, said that the puzzle was “a slap in the face for concentration camp survivors and relatives of victims. The Dachau memorial is a place of remembrance for the suffering of countless victims. It cannot be in Amazon's interest to sell such a gamw.”
On Monday, Amazon apparently removed the puzzle for sale. However, a similar puzzle modeled on a concentration camp in was still available.