Holocaust survivor organisations “are completely appalled” that a Google-owned company is using former Nazi concentration camps in an augmented-reality smartphone game.

“This is most definitely no place for video games,” Günter Morsch, the head of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial, told German newspaper Die Zeit.

Ingress, the science-fiction game, was developed by Niantic Labs, a start-up company owned by the search-engine giant. The game requires smartphone users to battle it out for stretches of land – in the real world – by visiting the sites. Once there, competitors search for ‘portals’, geo-tagged places on a map only visible to those who have downloaded the game to their devices. 

At one point, there were more than 70 of these player-controlled portals in the remains of the Sachsenhausen Camp, located north of Berlin, where more than 30,000 people died during the Nazi regime. Several other sites where former concentration camps were located, including Dachau – where there was 32,000 documented and thousands more undocumented deaths – were also included in the game.

Responding to criticism, Google has removed the user portals from the most well-known and sensitive camps in Germany, though there are still live portals at the death camp in Auschwitz in Poland.

"We strongly object to parts of the Dachau concentration camp being chosen as locations for the video game Ingress," Jean-Michel Thomas, president of the Comité Internationale de Dachau told Die Zeit. "We demand that this desecration be banned." 

When asked by the Hamburg-based newspaper why they had allowed the sites of the Holocaust atrocities to be included in a social-media mobile game, the company responded by saying "these special portals are of significant historical value and they were established by players for that reason."