Holocaust Museum Tells Visitors To Stop Catching Pokemon Here

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is asking players of the popular augmented reality smartphone game Pokemon Go to turn off the game when they visit. They believe playing the game in the museum is a form of disrepect.

Andy Hollinger, director of communications for the museum told NBC News:

"Playing Pokémon Go in a memorial dedicated to the victims of Nazism is extremely inappropriate. We are attempting to have the Museum removed from the game."

The musuem is located close t the National Mall opened in 1993, and educates visitos abut the millions of people killed by the Nazis frm 1933 to 1945.

Since the app's release last week, Pokemon Go has been a huge success for Nintendo, raising the company's stocks by 9%. The game was also said to surpass Twitter in terms of Daily Active Users.

Pokemon Go is a free downloadable app for iOS and Android devices in which players search out digital Pokémon in the real world using the GPS locator on their devices.

While a lot of players are getting more exercise because of the fun experience of the game, museum officials say that this is the wrong place to play it.

"The Museum encourages visitors to use their phones to share and engage with Museum content while here," Hollinger said. "Technology can be an important learning tool, but this game falls far outside of our educational and memorial mission."

A Washington Post reporter visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday, and reported that there "plenty of people inside the museum seemed to be distracted from its haunting exhibits as they tried to 'catch'em all.'"

Someone posed an image online that appears to show a player seeing an unsettling digital creature inside the museum: a Pokemon called Koffing that emits poisonous gas floating by a sign for the museum's Helena Rubinstein Auditorium, which shows the testimonials of Jews who survived the gas chambers.

Here's the original tweet that's since been removed from Imgur:

The image might be a hoax since the Pokemon didn't show up when the Washington Post reporter visited the museum on Monday afternoon, but the specific Pokemon that shows up in each location does vary from time to time. The Washington Post reports that Hollinger is concerned about the potential appearance of Koffing.

So do you think Niantic should exclude the museum from Pokemon Go?

Read: Pokemon Go Pub Crawls are Real and Happening All Over the World