Two Turkish history students avoided jail Monday after giving the Nazi salute at the former Auschwitz death camp, Polish police said.
The 22-year-old man and woman were detained on Sunday while taking pictures of each other performing the salute at the gates of the former Nazi German death camp in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim.
The two were found guilty of “propagating Nazism” and “desecrating a place of memory”,and received a six-month suspended jail term, police spokesman Mariusz Ciarka said, according to the Polish news agency PAP.
He said they admitted guilt, which allowed the Oswiecim court to sentence them without a trial. The court also fined them and confiscated the phone they used to snap the photos.
The Turks – both history students in the Hungarian capital Budapest – were freed on Monday.
The incident was the second time Turkish students were arrested at the site of the Majdanik death camp after giving Nazi salutes to a group of Israeli students and shouting “Heil Hitler”.
The incident highlighted growing anti-Semitism in Turkey, a phenomenon which has forced many young Turkish Jews to leave the country.
One million Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1940 to 1945, according to the museum at the site of the World War II camp.
More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi partisans also died at the camp.
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