Herewith are key phrases from the speech delivered Sunday by Pope Benedict XVI at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, died at the hands of Nazi Germany in WWII:

- 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.
In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread
silence -- a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?

- Our silence becomes a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.

- Twenty-seven years ago, on 7 June 1979, Pope John Paul II stood in this place. He said... "It was impossible for me not to come here as Pope." Pope John Paul came here as a son of that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in general, throughout the war. "Six million Poles lost their lives during the Second World War: a fifth of the nation", he reminded us.

- Pope John Paul came here as a son of that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in general, throughout the war.

- I could not fail to come here. I had to come. It is a duty before the
truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nations honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

- Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?

- When all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet
insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!

- Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of Gods name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.

- The place where we are standing is a place of memory, and at the same time the place of the Shoah. The past is never simply the past. It always has something to say to us; it tells us the paths to take and the paths not to take.

- The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth.

- If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world.

- By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.

- (On the Polish people): First and foremost they wanted to eliminate the cultural elite, thus erasing the Polish people as an autonomous historical subject and reducing it, to the extent that it continued to exist, to slavery.

- (On the Roma and Sinti people): They were seen as part of the refuse of world history, in an ideology which valued only the empirically useful; everything else, according to this view, was to be written off as lebensunwertes Leben - life unworthy of being lived.

- The Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here were considered as Abschaum der Nation -- the refuse of the nation. Today we gratefully hail them as witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were not eclipsed.

- At Auschwitz-Birkenau humanity walked through a "valley of darkness". And so, here in this place, I would like to end with a prayer of trust -- with one of the Psalms of Israel which is also a prayer of Christians: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want..."