Google-owned 'Ingress' game sent players to concentration camps to take part

Sites were included in Ingress game because they were of ‘significant historical value’, company said

A shot from promotional material for the 'Ingress' game

A Google gaming subsidiary has apologised after sending players to Nazi concentration camps as part of a game.

In Google-owned Niantic Labs’ game Ingress, users submit real-life locations for inclusion, and once they're approved players then battle to "control" that location. Those sites included Nazi concentration camps and memorials in Germany and Poland, according to German newspaper Die Zeit.

The company told Die Zeit that the sites had been added to the game because they were of "significant historical value". Some of the sites are still active, and the "portals" had been at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau and Buchenwald, along with another concentration and death camps.

"All of us here are completely appalled," Günter Morsch, the head of the Sachsenhausen Memorial that stands on the site of a camp where 30,000 people died, told Die Zeit. "This is most definitely no place for video games."

In a statement to Associated Press, the company’s founder John Hanke said that it had started taking the sites out of the game. “We apologise that this has happened,” he said, according to the AP.