World leaders to mark 60 years of liberation of Nazi camp

Flowers have been put on one of the portraits of a former prisoner in an exhibition in the former Auschwitz nazi death camp, one day before the ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. PHOTO: AFP

On Thursday, world leaders from 44 countries including Russian President Vladimir Putin, his French counterpart Jacques Chirac, and the president of host nation Aleksander Kwasniewski, will stand alongside survivors of the camp and soldiers of the Soviet Red Army in a solemn tribute to the victims of Auschwitz.

Late Tuesday US President George W. Bush urged Americans to observe the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, saying the Holocaust showed "evil is real, but hope endures."

"It is a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to oppose evil wherever it exists. It is a reminder that when we find anti-Semitism, we must come together to fight it," he said.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has also warned Germ-ans to be vigilant against the rise of neo-Nazis and voiced his shame at the horrors unleashed by the Nazi regime when more than six million people, mainly Jews, died in death and concentration camps.

"I express my shame over those who were murdered, and before those of you who have survived the hell of the concentration camps," he said.

And he warned: "That anti-Semitism still exists is not to be denied. It is the duty of all of society to fight against it."

German President Horst Koehler will also be at the main ceremony which will begin amid tight security on Thursday at 2:30 pm (1330 GMT) at the memorial erected at Birkenau to the memory of at least 1.1 million men, women and children who died at the camp.

Most of them were Jews sent to their deaths immediately on arrival at the Nazi death factory.

Because many of the victims were "selected" by the SS for immediate extermination in specially built gas chambers, they were never registered at Auschwitz, making it impossible for historians to say precisely how many people died here. The death toll is believed to be as high as two million.

The memorial at Birkenau lies between two of the gas chambers in which victims were killed, and at the end of the train track that brought them to the camp.

During the main ceremony, world leaders will hand centre stage to survivors of camp, including former Polish foreign minister -- Auschwitz prisoner number 4427 -- Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who will give a speech on behalf of the tens of thousands of Poles who died at the camp, not counting the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews.