X-Men: Apocalypse depicts Auschwitz destroyed

Director Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse is more than a week away from release in the UK, but it’s already managed to divide critics by showing Auschwitz being destroyed.

More than a million people – the vast majority of them Jews – died in the gas chambers at the infamous Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland, during the Second World War.

In the latest (and Singer’s third) X-Men film, Magneto (played by Michael Fassbender) is taken back to the camp where he spent his younger years suffering at the hands of the Nazis.

The latter has been explored by Singer before in the opening sequences of his first X-Men film, released in 2000.

Watch X-Men (2000) Opening Scene:

This time around though he is helped by Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), an ancient Egyptian mutant, to blow up the barracks and gas chambers and destroy the camp entirely.

Preview screenings have split the critics over whether it’s appropriate to use Holocaust imagery in the film.

Watch X-Men: Apocalypse UK Trailer

The Hollywood Reporter was “appalled”, while Inverse calls it “a shocking and deeply uncomfortable moment, even though the destruction was all digital…detonating a place where some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century took place, in a comic book movie no less, feels wildly unnecessary.”

No doubt audiences will be equally divided when the film, which also stars James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence, hits cinemas next week.

X-Men: Apocalypse is released in the UK on 18 May