As world leaders gather at death camp, Germans ponder how to ensure horrors of the Holocaust are not forgotten
Sixty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, Germany is working to keep memories of the darkest chapter of its history from fading at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe.
World leaders and Holocaust survivors will gather at the camp in Poland today to remember the magnitude of Adolph Hitler's attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews during the second world war.
Auschwitz, liberated on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet army, was left to stand as a stark warning to future generations against the evils of intolerance and hatred. More than a million people died in the camp's gas chambers or from overwork, malnutrition and disease. Only a few thousand survived.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly's first special session commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, German Foreign Minster Joschka Fischer called Auschwitz 'an eternal symbol for the disregard for human life and genocide in the history of humanity and my nation'.
Few countries have been so confronted with the darker aspects of their past as Germany. The Third Reich's horrific crimes are constantly examined on television, in print and at ritualised memorials for the victims. A massive monument dedicated to the estimated 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis will open in the heart of Berlin in May.
