• Auschwitz Museum told its visitors to stop sharing social media images where they balance on the railway beams on Wednesday.
• The tracks carried hundreds of thousands of victims to their deaths during World War II, it said.
• An Auschwitz spokesman told Business Insider that visitors have to be aware of what the site represents.
• The museum has an Instagram page, in which it curates photographs that visitors took respectfully. 

Auschwitz Museum has urged visitors to stop posing for social media photos on railway tracks used to ferry victims of Nazi extermination camps to their deaths in the Holocaust.

The museum shared social media images which showed visitors walking and posing on railway beams, and characterized them as disrespectful to the dead.

"When you come to Auschwitz Museum, remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory," the post said.

"There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths."

Auschwitz was the deadliest concentration camp that the Nazis established to enslave and murder Jewish, gay and political prisoners during World War II.

More than 70 years after it was liberated, millions of people a year visit the memorial in Oświęcim, which is now part of southern Poland. 

In a later tweet, the museum said it would not ban photographs like those it highlighted, but urged people not to take them.

Read more: This photograph was the most agonizing thing I saw at Auschwitz

Pawel Sawicki, a press officer at Auschwitz Museum, told Business Insider that the majority of the memorial's two million yearly visitors pose no problems, but that the proliferation of such photographs demanded a response. 

"Part of our mission is to protect the memory and dignity of the victims of Auschwitz," he said in a statement.

“Our aim is not to shame, but to raise awareness. People have to be aware of the nature of the place they visit," he added over the phone.

Sawicki declined to say where on social media the Auschwitz staff noticed the photos, and said that the museum does not want to single out individuals.

Auschwitz Museum set up an Instagram account, in which it curates its visitors' best pictures, and adds captions with context. The images show remnants of buildings, gas chambers, and crematoriums.

Relatively few include people.

The page shows "how images can commemorate victims & teach difficult and emotional history of Auschwitz," the museum said on Twitter. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Scientists completed one of the most detailed explorations inside the Great Blue Hole. Here's what they found at the bottom of the giant, mysterious sinkhole.