Ben Shapiro is a smooth-brained conservative pundit with a voice like Kermit the Frog, who has spent his entire life trying to achieve peak stupidity. He's also a fanatical zionist, and justifies his unquestioning support of Israel with profound statements like: "Settlements rock! Israelis like to build - Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage"....
In January 2024, after a high profile visit to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum with Elon Musk, he posted a video in which he said that Jews, Roma, Russian soldiers and homosexuals were killed there, but failed to mention the Polish victims.
Although Auschwitz-Birkenau eventually became an extermination centre in which nearly a million Jews were murdered, the Germans created the camp in 1940 initially for the purpose of interning Polish slavic prisoners, who made up the majority of the inmates until 1942.
According to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, at least 1.1 million of the 1.3 million people who were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau died there.
900,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival at the camp.
Of the 400,000 people who were registered as inmates, more than 50% did not survive.
They included 100,000 Jews, 70,000 Polish slavs, 21,000 Roma, 14,000 Soviet POWs and more than 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities, who died as a result of executions, medical experiments, starvation, brutality and disease.
Nobody knows how many LGBT people were deported to Auschwitz or died there, but only a tiny number were sent to the camp specifically for being gay. It's known that at least 77 men with pink triangles were imprisoned in Auschwitz and some scholars speak of up to 140 prisoners persecuted for their sexual orientation.
During their visit, Musk and Shapiro laid a wreath at the reconstructed "wall of death" next to Block 11, where SS men shot several thousand people, nearly all of whom were ethnically Polish - both Auschwitz prisoners and people who had been sent to the camp specifically to be executed, mainly for resistance activities.
It's amazing how often the camp's second largest victim group get erased from Western historical memory, but at least Shapiro didn't refer to Auschwitz as a "Polish concentration camp"....
