WARSAW (AFP)---A group of Orthodox Jews from Israel broke in Tuesday to the former Nazi extermination camp of Majdanek in eastern Poland, police said.

Security guards at the camp, now a museum, called the management and the police when the 33 Orthodox Jews penetrated the camp on Tuesday afternoon after the end of visiting hours.

"They forced open two gates that lead to the army barracks of the former Nazi camp," a police spokeswoman at the nearby town of Lublin, Anna Smazak, told AFP.

She said that the matter had been sorted out amicably after contact was established with the Israeli embassy in Warsaw.

"The head of the group, a man of 28, said that all the damage would be reimbursed," the police spokeswoman added.

The group’s motive for trying to gain access to Majdanek was not immediately clear.

At Majdanek death camp, set up by the Nazis near the eastern Polish city of Lublin, 360,000 people died between 1941 and 1944, either in the gas chamber or at the hands of firing squads.

Among the camp’s victims were 200,000 Jews, 120,000 non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.

The Nazis killed six million of Europe’s 11 million Jews in the Holocaust, half of them from Poland, which was home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community before the war.