The two leaders also visited the black Wall, where thousands of prisoners were executed. There, they lowered the head, in front of two crowns bearing the colours of their nations.
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Ms. Merkel needs to give a speech to the extermination camp of Birkenau, where gas chambers and crematoria were built. She has been invited to the death camp for the 10th anniversary of the Foundation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During his term as chancellor, Ms. Merkel has not hesitated to admit German responsibility for the atrocities committed by Adolf Hilter and the nazis during the Second world War.
Ms. Merkel has paid tribute to other nazi concentration camps, and she has been five times to the Holocaust museum and the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial.
His visit to Auschwitz will allow him to follow in the footsteps of two former chancellors of seeing the site before the end of its mandate.
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Ms. Merkel has made a donation of 60 million euros ($66.6 million) that will be donated to a fund designed to preserve the physical remains of the site — the barracks, the watchtowers, and personal items such as shoes and suitcases of the people killed.
These objects persist as evidence of the atrocities the German and as one of the most recognizable symbols in the world of humanity’s capacity for evil. But they deteriorate also under the pressure of time and of mass tourism, which leads to a conservation effort for the long term.
This donation to the auschwitz Foundation is in addition to the 60 million euros that Germany has given in the creation of the fund ten years ago, according to the State museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It also makes Germany by far the most generous of the 38 countries who contributed to the fund.
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“Auschwitz is a museum, but it is also the largest cemetery in the world… (The memory) is the key to building the present and the future “, told Reuters the director of the museum Piotr Cywinski before the visit of Angela Merkel at the invitation of the Auschwitz Foundation.
The Polish ministry of foreign Affairs has described his visit as’historic’, in recognition of the unique status that Auschwitz in the collective memory of the world.
Angela Merkel’s visit comes at a time when Europe experienced a peak of antisemitic feelings. A new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), based in New York, revealed that one European in four has beliefs anti-semitic.
“These results are a warning signal powerful : there is still much to be done to educate large segments of the population in many of these countries to reject sectarianism, in addition to responding to pressing needs in the area of security when the violent incidents increase,” He CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.
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The German forces, the nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people in the complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau during their occupation of Poland during the Second world War. Most of the victims were Jews transported from across Europe to be killed in the gas chambers. But tens of thousands of others have also been killed, including Poles, soviet prisoners of war and Roma, or Gypsies. The camp was liberated by the soviet army on 27 January 1945.
Talia Kaplan of Fox News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.