An Indonesian visual effects museum that encouraged visitors to take selfies with a waxwork of Adolf Hitler against a giant image of the Auschwitz extermination camp has removed the exhibit after protests.

The De Mata Trick Eye Museum's marketing officer said the statue was removed on Friday night after outrage from Jewish and rights groups.

Human Rights Watch had denounced the exhibit as "sickening" and the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which campaigns against Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, had demanded its immediate removal.

The museum, which has waxworks of about 80 famous people, including Star Wars character Darth Vader — next to the Hitler exhibit — had the Hitler figure on display since 2014.

In 2015, it tweeted a photo of a staff member standing next to the waxwork without the Auschwitz background, with the hashtag #TheBestPlaceToTakeYourPict

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It initially defended the exhibit as "fun" and said it was one of the most popular waxworks with visitors to the infotainment-style museum in the central Java city of Yogyakarta.

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On Sunday, the space at the museum occupied by Hitler was empty and the image of Auschwitz, where more than 1 million people were exterminated by the Nazi regime, was gone.

A sign in front of the empty space now reads "Famous figures of the world" in Bahasa Indonesian.

Nazi imagery is commonly used across South-East Asia, including Indonesia, where a cafe called Soldaten Kaffee had waiters dress in SS uniforms and stated on its Facebook page in 2014: "Nazis only killed Jews and Communists, and never planned to kill Africans, Indians, Chinese or Malays."

The cafe reportedly closed early this year and its web page is blank.

One of Myanmar's most famous bands is called Iron Cross and uses the Nazi imperial eagle as its emblem, while images of Hitler appeared in Thailand in 2013 in a student mural at university Chulalongkorn and as KFC's Colonel Sanders.

In 2014, Indonesian musicians made a music video for a modified version of Queen's We Will Rock You wearing Nazi uniforms and using other Nazi imagery.

The video, which was made as a tribute to presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, stirred outrage but was defended by singer Ahmad Dhani, who said: "We Indonesians didn't kill millions of Jews, right?"

The campaign team for General Prabowo, who would lose the election to Joko Widodo, first defended the video before asking the singers to remove it.

The exhibit's space is now empty. ( AP: AK Hendratmo )

ABC/AP