“Auschwitz ain’t got nothin' on us.” That was the short-lived slogan of a Russian sauna in Novosibirsk, whose owner claims he didn’t really pay attention to the connection to the infamous concentration camp.
“I ordered the website three months ago and nobody cared about the slogan, but today journalists have been calling me all day long,” Vyacheslav Boyev told the news site Takie Dela. “A programmer, a young guy, suggested the analogy that our banya is so warm and hot that ‘Auschwitz ain’t got nothin' on us.’ I said okay, without thinking about it.”
Strangely, the original name of Boyev’s business, “ABWEHR,” also has Nazi overtones. From 1920 to 1945, the Abwehr was a German military intelligence organization.
Boyev told Takie Dela that he had no idea about the Abwehr’s history. “I’m in shock,” he said, adding that he’s renamed the sauna “ABVDTs” (though it’s unclear what this means).
When the story about the “Auschwitz slogan” first broke on Monday, Boyev was markedly more combative with the first reporters to contact him for an explanation about his business’ slogan.
He told the Novosibirsk news portal NGS.Novosti, “Why do you need to know? Just curious? Do you know what Auschwitz is? What they did there? They burned people, right? And I have a banya that’s so hot that it’s hotter than it was at Auschwitz.”
According to customer reviews on one website, dating back to 2012, there doesn’t appear to be any record of clients complaining about the business’ name or slogan.
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