Twitter screenshot of Princess Breanna's Auschwitz selfie tweet with retweet counts

Auschwitz Selfie

2014viral photoclassic

Published August 15, 2026

The Auschwitz Selfie is a smiling self-portrait posted to Twitter in 2014 by American teenager Breanna Mitchell outside the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. When the picture went viral a month later, it drew heavy online backlash and days of news coverage before Mitchell stepped away from the tweet.

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Overview

The Auschwitz Selfie is a photo of American teenager Breanna Mitchell smiling outside the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, which she posted from her Twitter handle @PrincessBMM1. The image pairs a bright smile and a smiley-face emoticon caption with the site of a Nazi death camp, and that contrast drove the reaction once the tweet caught wider attention2.

When the photo was rediscovered a month after posting, Twitter split between people who called the pose offensive and others who felt the harassment aimed at a teenage girl had gone too far, and Mitchell said she took the picture in remembrance of her father1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter
Creator
Breanna Mitchell
Date
2014

Breanna Mitchell tweeted the selfie from the handle @PrincessBMM on June 20, 2014, with the caption "Selfie in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp" followed by a smiley face1. The photo sat with little engagement for roughly a month before a wider audience surfaced it on Sunday, July 20, 2014, turning it into a Twitter trending topic2.

How It Spread

Once the tweet trended on July 20, 2014, angry replies flooded in alongside a growing group of defenders1. In less than 48 hours the original post gathered nearly 4,000 retweets and over 2,600 favorites, and Mitchell retweeted more than 150 messages from supporters1.

Same-day articles ran on Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and Newsday, with the New York Post and The Mirror in the UK covering the story the following day2. Mitchell briefly leaned into the attention, tweeting "I'm famous yall" after Business Insider wrote her up1. She soon asked people to stop retweeting the picture and stepped back from the mentions1.

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