Auschwitz visit 'difficult and troubling' for pope

Benedict XVI meets concentration camp survivors

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) -- German-born Pope Benedict XVI, visiting Auschwitz as "a son of the German people," denounced the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust and underlined the reality of Hitler's campaign to wipe out European Jews.

"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible -- and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said.

Earlier, he walked solemnly with his hands clasped, passing alone beneath Auschwitz's infamous gate -- a solitary figure in white.

Benedict's black-clad entourage kept its distance as he walked under the notorious words on the gate, "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Sets You Free."

Other than a brief greeting to the local bishop, Benedict kept silent as he entered, his lips moving in prayer and the wind tossing his white hair as he stopped for a full minute before the Wall of Death, where the Nazis killed thousands of prisoners. Then he was handed a lighted candle, which he placed before the wall.

Then he moved to the monument at the neighboring Birkenau camp, praying under a light rain before plaques in the languages of the different nationalities of those who died there.

As he prayed, the rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow arched over the camp.

The Nazi occupiers who built the camp near the town of Oswiecim -- Auschwitz in German -- killed as many as 1.5 million people there, most of them Jews. Others included Poles, Roma or Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, and political opponents of the Nazis.

The visit -- by a German who was unwillingly enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager and later drafted into the German army -- is fraught with significance for Catholic-Jewish relations, a favorite theme for Benedict and predecessor John Paul.

At the Wall of death, a line of 32 elderly camp survivors awaited Benedict, most of them Catholic. He moved slowly down the line, stopping to talk with each, taking one woman's face in his hands and kissing one of the men on both cheeks.

Benedict then visited the dark cell in the basement of one of the buildings, the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Roman Catholic priest, was executed after voluntarily taking the place of a condemned prisoner with a large family.

Benedict stopped to pray again in the cell, standing before a candle placed there by John Paul II during his 1979 visit.

It's the third time Benedict has visited Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau; the first was in 1979, when he accompanied John Paul, and in 1980, when he came with a group of German bishops while he was archbishop of Munich.

The visit to Auschwitz was the last stop on a four-day trip to Poland, during which Benedict has urged Poles to serve as a beacon of faith in a mostly secular Europe.