A 33-year-old Polish man living in Germany is facing up to five years in prison after building a replica of the gates of Auschwitz and erecting them outside a local tax office.
According to his mother, the man, known as Marius P, had “become overwhelmed” by the £59,000 debt he had racked up in unpaid taxes and had become depressed.
The two-metre-tall sculpture, which was left outside the tax office in the Bavarian town of Eggenfelden in April, was a near-identical replica of the infamous concentration camp gates, to the extent that even the “B” in the lettering “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work will set you free) was upside down, as it was in the original.
It was completed with wooden swastikas lining the outside of the gates.
A second installation appeared days later in the tax office car park - a black chimney-like structure resembling a cremation oven used in the concentration camps. It included the label "Zyklon B,” the name of the cyanide-based chemical used in the gas chambers.
Marius was detained in mid-April after police matched his fingerprints, according to German news outlet Passauer Neue Presse (PNP) and he is currently awaiting trial.
Additional Nazi symbols were later discovered in his apartment, per the reports.
His mother told Germany newspaper Bild that her son was “neither an extremist nor an antisemite”, but was “overwhelmed” and “depressed”.
Germany has one of the strictest laws in Europe regarding public references to the Nazi era, and any offence that is deemed to be trivialising Nazi crimes can carry with it a five-year sentence.
Local Mayor Martin Biber called the replicas “brazen and disgusting” and an “insult to society”.
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