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| Call Auschwitz an 'extermination' camp, Poland asks UNESCO
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WARSAW (AFP)--- Polish officials said Thursday they have asked that the former Auschwitz camp in southern Poland be listed among UNESCO's world heritage sites not only as a Nazi German concentration camp but also as an extermination site.
"On June 2, the Culture Ministry added to an earlier request to UNESCO, asking that it take into account a suggestion from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, that the word 'extermination' be added to the name," Culture Ministry spokesman Jan Kasprzyk told AFP.
In March, Poland asked UNESCO to clearly refer to Auschwitz as a former Nazi German concentration camp, to avoid the atrocities committed in the camp, where at least 1.1 million mostly Jewish people were killed by the Germans in WWII, being associated with Poland.
Adding the word "extermination" would recall the intention of the Nazi regime to wipe out European Jewry in its chilling Final Solution, Kasprzyk said.
Poland hopes that the new appellation for the death camp will be approved by UNESCO when it meets in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, from July 8 to 16.
The UN culture organisation currently lists the site as the "Auschwitz Concentration Camp," but says in its accompanying description that the "fortified walls, barbed wire, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and cremation ovens show the conditions within which the Nazi genocide took place in the former concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest in the Third Reich."
Warsaw lodged its original request to change the camp's name on the UNESCO list following frequent foreign media reports that described former concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek, run by the Nazis in Poland during WWII, as "Polish" death camps.
Even respected publications such as the New York Times and Germany's Der Spiegel weekly referred to the camps in this way.
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