Were “Minions” inspired by kids the Nazis used for poison gas experiments?

With Despicable Me’s Minions becoming more popular than ever, a meme recently went viral that links the small, yellow creatures to the Nazis.

A photo of a group of people wearing huge head masks and unusual uniforms spread across social media sites with caption,

“Minions were Jew (sic) kids adopted by Nazi scientists for their experiments. They spent most of their lives in suffering and because they couldn’t speak German, their words were hilarious sounds for German.”

This sparked different comments from netizens. Some believed the claims without checking the facts while a few shared their two cents, saying that if you believe the photo, you are the “most uneducated, gullible” person on the planet.

The origin of the viral photo

According to Snopes, it all started on July 19 when Spanish social media users started sharing this photo captioned with claims that those are young Holocaust victims that the Nazi scientists used to test Cyclon-B gas, a component applied used gas chambers.

Another version of the meme which was captioned with “Despicable Me” was a live-action film from the 1920s.