Online retailer pulls Zyklon-B themed T-shirts and mugs by British designer

An online retailer has pulled products themed on Zylkon-B, the cyanide-based pesticide used by Nazis to murder millions of Jews in gas chambers.

The designers, called ImperivmCloth, described themselves as “a couple of guys, up to no good, starting to make trouble”, the Berliner Zeitung reported.

Products marked “Zyklon-B” in the style of the logo used by the dental hygiene brand Oral-B were sold on Redbubble, which sells designs by thousands of artists.

The items, which have been removed, included sweatshirts, t-shirts, mugs, rucksacks and pillows, and were marketed with the slogan: “You too can look minty fresh with this beautiful Zyklon-B design.”

This comes a little over a month after the Melbourne-based website came under fire for selling Auschwitz-themed miniskirts, pillows and tote bags. 

The social media page for the concentration camp memorial tweeted at the time: “This is rather disturbing and disrespectful.

“Do you really think that selling such products as pillows, miniskirts or tote bags with the images of Auschwitz – a place of enormous human tragedy where over 1,1 million people were murdered – is acceptable?”

The products were removed, and the company said on Twitter that the designs were “not acceptable” and that it had taken immediate action to remove them from the platform.

Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust Karen Pollock said: “What possesses someone to think that it could be at all appropriate to promote Zyklon B – a poisonous, murderous gas – or views of Auschwitz-Birkenau – the former Nazi concentration and death camp where 1.1 million were murdered – as clothes to wear or cushions to display at home? It beggars belief.

“Whilst I’m glad that Redbubble have removed these items from sale, I’d strongly advise them to look at their procedures to prevent this sort of thing in the future.”

A spokesperson for Redbubble said the platform reviews tens of thousands of designs uploaded every day.

“Sometimes designs that have no place on Redbubble aren’t caught by our monitoring, as with this case,” the spokesperson said.

“We removed them as soon as they were brought to our attention by the community, and continue to be committed to keeping racist and violent content off the site.”