Auschwitz Memorial Calls WWE “Shameless” Over Insensitive Video Promo Footage at WrestleMania 39

This past Saturday’s WWE WrestleMania 39 Night 1 event in Inglewood, California featured a singles match between Rey Mysterio and Dominik Mysterio.

Prior to the start of the match, WWE aired a pre-match video featuring Dominik Mysterio being held and released from a prison setting. This was a nod to Dominik’s storyline of being arrested following his Christmas Eve incident with Rey and his family at the Mysterio family home.

In an interesting note, a piece of the footage used for the prison setting for Dominik’s video was alleged to have been from the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, which saw the murder of around 1.1 million people as part of the Holocaust during World War II.

Someone in the WWE tried to find prison footage for Dominik Mysterio's "hard time" video and ended up using footage of what I'm pretty sure is the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. It ran during the WrestleMania kickoff. pic.twitter.com/0J6lqnqWVe

— Aaron Wrotkowski (@AaronWrotkowski) April 2, 2023

The Auschwitz Memorial museum recently commented on Twitter confirming that the piece of footage used by WWE was indeed from the Auschwitz concentration camp and called the company shameless for using it for a wrestling promo video and insulting the memory of those who had tragically died in camp.

The fact that Auschwitz image was used to promote a WWE match is hard to call “an editing mistake”. Exploiting the site that became a symbol of enormous human tragedy is shameless and insults the memory of all victims of Auschwitz.

The fact that Auschwitz image was used to promote a WWE match is hard to call "an editing mistake". Exploiting the site that became a symbol of enormous human tragedy is shameless and insults the memory of all victims of Auschwitz.https://t.co/b4bbYgWPwj https://t.co/Xud4rbhEUS pic.twitter.com/tuJrzmK6mQ

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) April 5, 2023