Swiss council bosses who used a picture of the Nazi death camp Dachau on their website have been forced to apologise.

The notice was supposed to announce service times at the local church in Schattdorf, a village in Switzerland’s German-speaking region.

But instead of showing the church, they illustrated the post with a photograph of the gates of Dachau concentration camp.

The image even shows the notorious Nazi slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’, or ‘Work sets you free’.

An innocent message underneath the chilling snap is headed “Opening hours of the Assumption of Mary”.

It simply gives the parish church’s opening times during an upcoming public holiday on 15th August.

The announcement continued: “Closed on Monday, 15th August, 2022! We wish you a happy holiday! Your Schattdorf Municipal Administration.”

Local officials were quick to blame a bungling council worker and denied any secret Nazi sympathies.

Schattdorf Municipal Secretary Daniel Muench described the blunder as an “embarrassing mistake made by an employee, without any ulterior motive”.

He claimed that the employee was not aware of the quotation’s Nazi notoriety.

Muench claimed she had chosen the image “unconsciously and without knowledge of its historical context.”

He added: “She’s not an anti-Semite.”

The image of Dachau – where at least 32,000 inmates were killed between 1933 and 1945 – has since been taken down from the council’s website.

Dachau was the first German concentration camp and opened shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power.

Originally for political prisoners, it developed into an extermination camp for Jews, homosexuals, communists and other groups banned by the regime.

Tens of thousands of inmates were executed, worked to death as slave labour or subjected to gruesome medical experiments.