Google apologizes for putting Nazi camps in game

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has apologized for putting Nazi concentration camps in the mobile game Ingress.

Ingress is a multiplayer augmented reality game in which people embark with their smartphones on missions to fight for control of virtual portals in a larger battle for Earth.

Players can include historic locations such as monuments and landmarks in the game, but first they must submit those locations to Ingress for approval.

The German weekly Die Zeit reported Thursday that some of these locations were inside concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

"All of us here are completely appalled," Günter Morsch, the head of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, told Die Zeit. "This is most definitely no place for video games."

Google said the locations were added to the game because they were of "significant historical value."

Ingress is made by Niantic Labs, essentially a tiny startup inside Google run by John Hanke, the brains behind Google Earth, Maps and Street View.

"After we were made aware that a number of historical markers on the grounds of former concentration camps in Germany had been added, we determined that they did not meet the spirit of our guidelines and began the process of removing them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe," Hanke said in a statement. "We apologize that this happened."

Google did not respond to questions from USA TODAY about why it approved the locations, how many were approved and when they would be removed from Ingress.

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor from Poland, said Google engaged in a dangerous trend of "Holocaust trivialization."

"The more our society engages in Holocaust trivialization, the more it is likely for us to see this phenomenon: that even concentration camps become the subject of games," Foxman said. "It's sad, it is very sad. And unless we educate about the lessons of the Holocaust, this will continue to get worse. We need to continue to teach about why so many of America's best gave their lives not only to protect freedom, but to stand against the bestiality and brutality of racist supremacy."

In the early 1990s, video games surfaced in Austria and Germany that had titles such as "Aryan Test," included graphics of swastikas and featured players earning points for torturing or gassing prisoners.

Rabbi Avraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center drew attention to the games, saying they were neo-Nazi propaganda being used to influence young people.

Rabbi Cooper is in Europe this week where he has been visiting memorials at concentration camps. In a phone interview from Warsaw, Poland, he said it was "disturbing" that Google would include these sites in a mobile game.

"It is very, very important for these most powerful titans of society today," to have a firm grasp of the Holocaust, he said.

"There are a lot of young people out there, maybe including the people running some important companies, who lack some basic grounding in history," Rabbi Cooper said. "It's not the technology per se that worries me, it's the lack of historical perspective and depth, and quite frankly the lack of values and ethics."

Rabbi Cooper offered to put together a week-long itinerary of the concentration camps in Germany and Poland for Google managers and the team behind Ingress.

"They could spend the week in Europe at Auschwitz and Dachau and see what they actually represented," he said.