Auschwitz set to be renamed

The United Nations has decided to rename the Auschwitz death camp to make it clear it was run by Germans and not Poles, it has been announced.

Auschwitz and the linked Birkenau camp in Poland will now be officially known as Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German Concentration and Death Camp, the Polish Culture Minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski said in Warsaw.

A spokesman for Unesco, the UN's Paris-based education and culture arm, said it could not currently confirm the news.

More than a million Jews from across Europe were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz and Birkenau in occupied Poland during World War Two.

Many Poles worry that the world is forgetting the camps were set up by the Germans.

"This is a victory of truth over lies, a victory of an absolutely fundamental value which is historical truth," Mr Ujazdowski said, with the Israeli ambassador at his side.

Warsaw points to references to "Polish gas chambers" or the "Polish concentration camps" in world media as evidence that Poles are wrongly portrayed as collaborators with the Nazis in killing Jews.

Last year, Poland formally asked Unesco to change the camp's name. Jewish organisations and Israel have backed the plans despite having initial reservations.

Unesco's World Heritage Committee has been meeting in New Zealand this week to discuss various nominated heritage sites.

German forces occupying Poland set up Auschwitz in southern Poland in 1940 as a labour camp for Polish prisoners, gradually expanding it into a vast labour and death camp that became the centrepiece of their plans to kill all European Jews.

Between 1.2 and 1.5 million people died there, most of them Jews. Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and prisoners of conscience or religious faith were also killed.

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