British fascists photographed giving Nazi salutes in Buchenwald camp ‘corpse cellar’

British neo-Nazis who gave the Hitler salute and joked about ‘meat hooks’ in a concentration camp have caused outrage across Germany and are now the subject of a criminal probe.

Fascists who belong to the fringe National Action group gave the banned salute in the ‘corpse cellar’ of Buchenwald concentration camp, near the German city of Weimar.

Bodies of exterminated Jews and other victims of the Third Reich’s Holocaust were once stored in the subterranean room where the men performed the crass publicity stunt.

Nazi salutes are illegal under German law and the men could be jailed for up to six months if they are found guilty.

A photo of the action was posted on the group’s Twitter feed on May 20.

German newspaper Bild said: “What was especially perfidious … was the fact that next to large hooks from which the SS hung bodies the neo-Nazis wrote ‘meat hook.’”

Staff at the memorial site, which is visited by half a million tourists and Holocaust survivors each year, complained to the police over the incident.

“The British pro-Nazis displayed a specific criminal energy in the corpse cellar of the camp,” said Dr Volkhard Knigge, director of the site.

“They openly identified with the Nazis and their mass murder programme. This is a grave insult to the 280,000 people who were imprisoned here, some of them British.”

A police spokesman said they are working to identify the culprits.