WARSAW/LONDON (AFP-EJP)---Britain will contribute 2.1 million pounds (2.4 million euros, 3.4 million dollars) to help preserve the site of Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the British embassy in Poland said Thursday.   

"I am determined that the government should take an active approach to preserving the memory of the Holocaust," British Foreign Minister William Hague was quoted as saying in an embassy statement.   

"Auschwitz-Birkenau is a searing reminder of the horrific consequences of intolerance and hatred. It should never been forgotten," he added.   

"Today’s commitment sends a clear message that we have a responsibility to safeguard the future of the camp," commented Lord Greville Janner of Braunstone, Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).

He added: "The Holocaust Educational Trust gives over 3,000 British students each year the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. This announcement will ensure that when young people visit Auschwitz, they will see for themselves what can happen when racism and prejudice is allowed to go unchecked."

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history and an iconic symbol of the Holocaust, the extermination of European Jewry.

The camp was set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II.    

Over the decades since the conflict ended 95 percent of the annual costs of preserving the site -- now around five million euros -- has met by the Polish state and revenues from publications and guided tours.   

In 2009, Poland launched a 120-million-euro appeal, aiming to create an endowment that would ensure the site's long-term future.   

A year after invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis opened what was to become a vast complex on the edge of the southern town of Oswiecim -- Auschwitz in German.   

They later expanded it to the nearby village of Brzezinka, or Birkenau.

Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 1.1 million were murdered at the site, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.