Merkel, who came to the camp for the first time in her 14 years as chancellor, added: “These were atrocities which are beyond all imagination.”
“The suffering in Auschwitz, death in gas chambers, cold, famine, pseudo-medical experiments, forced labour until full exhaustion, what happened here is incomprehensible to the human mind,” the German chancellor was quoted as saying by Polish state news agency PAP.
Merkel was taking part in ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation.
She brought a EUR 60 million donation to the foundation, which maintains and protects the camp, now a memorial site in southern Poland, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
“Auschwitz is a German death camp operated by Germans. It is important to highlight this and make it clear who the perpetrators were,” Merkel said.
The use of historically inaccurate terms by some international media and organisations has sparked numerous complaints from Poland in recent years, prompting some news agencies to change their style guidelines and eliminate misnomers such as "Polish" death camps.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who along with Merkel laid wreaths at Auschwitz on Friday, said that anybody who was passive in the face of historical lies was a “co-author of those lies.”
“That is why today all of us have to nourish the truth about those times with utmost care,” he added.
More than 1.1 million people were killed by the Germans at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied southern Poland during World War II.
The victims were mostly European Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and prisoners of other nationalities.
The German Auschwitz-Birkenau camp operated from 1940 until its liberation by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
Over six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, the German Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe’s Jewish population.
During a visit to Poland in September, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked for forgiveness for the destruction his country unleashed during World War II.
(jh/pk)
Source: PAP
Click on the audio icon above to listen to a report by Radio Poland's Tomasz Ferenc.