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Company Takes Down Birkenau Image from Website

Whoops.

by
Adam Chandler
August 06, 2013

On Friday, employees at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum noticed that an image of the infamous death campaign was being used in a campaign by Econ One, a Los Angeles consulting firm. Thanks to some intrepid reporting by the JTA, the image has since been taken down.

“Econ One was not aware that the image used in our ad to depict the movie, ‘The Great Escape,’ was an image of Birkenau,” Lisa Skylar, the chief operating officer of the litigation and business consulting firm, wrote Monday in an email to JTA. “Thank you for bringing it to our attention.

Compounding the problem, the accompanying text on the image highlighted the virtues of efficiency, good work, and client services. Also, compounding the problem, the image really looks like a concentration camp.

This is a departure from an earlier controversy this year in which a billboard featuring a Michael Graves-designed teapot was taken down because it too closely resembled Hitler. What a world.

Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.