A EX-WORLD champion boxer has sparked a huge backlash after he posted a beaming selfie with his girlfriend while visiting Auschwitz.
Former British IBF champ Jamie McDonnell, 35, has been slammed for taking the pictures with his girlfriend on a “lovely trip” to the concentration camp.
The now deleted pictures show him grinning at the camera while visiting the death camp which saw thousands of people killed.
His “tone deaf” post sparked a huge outcry from members of the public, with one asking him if he knew it was a “concentration camp and not Disneyland.”
The two-time World Champion posted the series of selfies, which have now been deleted, with the comment “lovely day trip today round Auschwitz, opens your eyes a lot”.
One of the pictures showed him standing with his girlfriend at the entrance to Auschwitz, and has defended himself and the photos – branding his critics as “keyboard warriors.”
One Twitter user replied: “I don’t think the term lovely is quite appropriate for a description of Auschwitz.
“Also probs best not to pose like that in a place people experienced hell, suffering, torture, and death. But hey at least it opened your eyes.”
Another said: “I do think it is good that they took the time to visit Auschwitz and I’m sure they learned a lot but the optics here are not great.
“You really don’t need to take photos at an extermination camp – you certainly shouldn’t be taking selfies. The site is a mass grave.”
A third added: “Whoever it is I hope he gets sparked clean out, there obviously isn’t much of a brain there to damage in fairness anyway.
“You would assume that after seeing the backlash to his grossly insensitive tweet he might acknowledge his mistake, instead he makes fun of it. D***head.”
But McDonnell deided to fight back, sparring with anyone who had disagreed with his now deleted post.
He said: “Obviously meaning a nice day out with the misses her in Poland, and the place opens your eyes, chill your bean.”
“Ok mate it’s a tourist place is it not so if we visit we can’t smile, come on pal.
“That’s why I am there obviously, I have a weekend away with my girlfriend, I’m not going to not smile am I, but I understand what’s happened chill out a bit.”
He also said that those criticising him needed to “get a life” and said that it was “getting boring.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest of the Nazi concentration camps and 1.1m prisoners, mostly Jews, died there.
It was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940.
But Adolf Hitler then presided over the extermination of those arriving, with the first inmates executed in September 1941.
From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed en masse with the pesticide Zyklon B.
It was finally liberated in January 1945, with one in six of the Jews exterminated during the Holocaust dying there.
