A Polish e-commerce company has removed more than 1,000 items from its website that were emblazoned with Nazi content.
According to the NEVER AGAIN Association, a Polish NGO that focuses on removing anti-Semitic content from the Internet, the Allegro company relented to NEVER AGAIN’s campaign against them and removed “necklaces, signet rings and badges with Nazi swastikas, contemporary imitations of Nazi military decorations, a brass bust of Hitler, watches, lighters and flasks with emblems of the Third Reich” as well as CDs that featured Nazi music.
Additionally, Allegro and NEVER AGAIN are partnering on a program called The Rights Protection Cooperation to ensure that such Nazi products and their ilk are not up for sale ever again on their site.
The NEVER AGAIN Association has been spearheading the fight to remove the aforementioned items from Allegro’s website since 2009. The fight made its way to the Polish Supreme Court in 2015, as Allegro argued their rights had been infringed by NEVER AGAIN using a picture of Allegro’s logo where the two L’s were modified into a swastika. The Supreme Court upheld an appellate court ruling that the image was legal under Polish law, stating that it was “a socially legitimate interest” to fight back against the rising tide of fascism in Europe.
“The Internet has become a space in which hatred is propagated on a large scale and in various ways,” NEVER AGAIN’s Dr. Anna Tatar said in a statement. “Allegro, the largest e-commerce company in Poland, has decided to strive to eradicate this type of offers and we are more than pleased with the results of our cooperation. A lot of effort is still needed to make objects or publications with racist and anti-Semitic content disappear from this site for good.”
