As the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, concern for

As the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, experts warned that an avalanche of “AI garbage” is threatening efforts to preserve the memory of Nazi crimes and the millions of Jews murdered during World War II.

Images seen by the News news agency include an emaciated and apparently blind man standing in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp Flossenbuerg, and a viral image of a girl with curly hair on a tricycle falsely presented as a 13-year-old Berliner who died at the Auschwitz death camp.

Such content, whether produced as click bait for commercial purposes or for political reasons, has proliferated over the past year, distorting the story of Nazi Germany’s murder of six million European Jews during World War II.

The first examples emerged in the spring of 2025, but by the end of the year, “AI deviations” on the subject were “shown very frequently,” historian Iris Groschek told News.

On some sites, examples of such content were posted once a minute, said Groschek, who works on Holocaust memorial sites in Hamburg, including the Neuengamme concentration camp.

With the exponential advances in AI, “the phenomenon is growing,” Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the foundation that manages the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorials, told News.

Several Holocaust memorials and associations published an open letter this month warning about the growing amount of this “completely fabricated” content.

Some of them are produced by content farms that exploit “the emotional impact of the Holocaust for maximum reach with minimum effort,” he said.

The image supposedly from the Flossenbuerg camp falls into this category, as shown on a page that claims to share “real human stories from the darkest chapters of the past.”

But the memorials warned that false content was also being created, “specifically to dilute historical facts, change the roles of victim and perpetrator, or spread revisionist narratives.”

Wagner points, for example, to images of apparently “well-fed” prisoners, which are intended to suggest that conditions in the concentration camps were not really that bad.

The Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Center warned of a “flood” of AI-generated content and propaganda “in which the Holocaust is denied or trivialized, and its victims ridiculed.”

By distorting history, AI-generated images have “very concrete consequences for how people perceive the Nazi era,” Groschek said.

The results of trivializing or denying the Holocaust have been seen in the attitudes of some younger visitors to the camps, particularly from “rural areas of eastern Germany… where far-right thinking has become dominant,” Wagner said.

In their open letter, the memorials called on social media platforms to “proactively combat AI content that distorts history” and “exclude accounts that spread such content from all monetization programs.”

“The challenge for society as a whole is to develop ethical and historically responsible standards for this technology,” they stated, adding: “Platform operators have a particular responsibility in this regard.”

German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said in a statement to News: “I support the call by monuments to clearly label AI-generated images and remove them where necessary.”

He said making money from such images should be avoided.

“This is a question of respect for the millions of people who were murdered and persecuted under the Nazi reign of terror,” he said, reminding the platforms that have obligations under the EU Digital Services Law.

Groschek said none of the American social media companies had responded to the memorial letter, including Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

TikTok responded by saying it wanted to exclude the accounts in question from monetization and implement “automatic verification,” according to Groschek.