WARSAW (AFP)---Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel was among some 150 Holocaust survivors, officials and researchers taking part on Monday in a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the museum at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

"I would like to believe that one day the leaders of the G8 will meet here at Auschwitz, to learn what is important and what is not," said Wiesel, quoted by the Polish PAP news agency.

"I would like the United Nations to meet here. I know what I am saying is naive, but the time will come," Wiesel added.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum was the brainchild of former prisoners -- among them Wiesel and former Polish foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski -- several months after the end of World War II.

The museum was formally established on the orders of Poland’s parliament on July 2, 1947, over two years after the occupying Nazis retreated in the face the advancing Soviet army.

The museum is the guardian of a 191-hectare site -- Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest camp in a vast Nazi network stretching across a swathe of occupied Europe.

The Nazis set up the Auschwitz nine months after invading Poland in September 1939.

It was housed in what had been a Polish army barracks on the edge of the southern Polish town of Oswiecim -- named Auschwitz in German.

In 1941 Germany began constructing a vast complex of huts, gas chambers and crematoriums on the site of the village of Brzezinka, or Birkenau.

Some 1.1 million people died at the death camp between 1940 and 1945 -- one million of them Jews from Poland and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe -- some by overwork, starvation and disease, but most in the gas chambers, to which many new arrivals were sent directly.

Also among the victims of the camp were 85,000 non-Jewish Poles, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 20,000 gypsies and 12,000 non-Jewish citizens of other countries, including resistance fighters from around Europe.

In 1979, Auschwitz-Birkenau was added to the World Heritage List, which covers historically-important sites recognised by UNESCO, the United Nations’cultural agency.

Last week, UNESCO approved a formal name change from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp".

Poland’s request for the name change was prompted by repeated references in the foreign media to the "Polish death camps" of World War II.

Monday’s conference was held to mark the museum’s six-decade mission to keep the Nazis’ crimes in the public eye and act as a memorial for their victims.