Sprinklers have been installed near the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, leading to criticisms of insensitivity because of their perceived similarity to the Nazi gas chambers.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel comfortable going into a shower at the entrance to an extermination camp," Rabbi Rafi Ostroff wrote on Facebook, alongside pictures of the mist sprinklers.

"They apparently had good intentions in the face of the extreme heat, but [what about] a little sensitivity", he said, according to a translation by Haaretz.

"Am I exaggerating? Or am I again imagining the lack of sensitivity to the Jewish story by the heads of the museum.”

The museum distanced itself from the sprinklers, posting on Twitter to say they had not been installed by the museum and were not located on its premises.

The sprinklers were installed in a nearby car park run by the local municipality, the museum added.

Visitors to the museum complained about similar sprinklers last year, which were installed at the entrance to the memorial.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

The memorial said the mist sprinklers had been installed to cool visitors to the museum and rejected the comparison between the sprinklers and the gas chambers.

"It is really hard for us to comment on some suggested historical references since the mist sprinkles do not look like showers and the fake showers installed by Germans inside some of the gas chambers were not used to deliver gas into them," the museum wrote on their Facebook page in August 2015.

"Zyklon B was dropped inside the gas chambers in a completely different way - through holes in the ceiling or airtight drops in walls."

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More than six million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust – their "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".