LONDON (AFP)---Britain will help fund two students from every
school in England to visit Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust, in a bid to help teach the lessons of the genocide to the younger generation, the
government announced on Monday.

The sixth-form students, who are typically between 16 and 18 years old,
will meet with survivors of the Holocaust, and will be shown the camp's
barracks, see inmates' registration documents, and piles of victims' clothes,
shoes and hair.

Founded in 1947 at the site of the Nazi-era death camp, the state-run
Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Oswiecim, received 1.22 million
visitors in 2007.

Around 1.1 million people died at the hands of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945, either asphyxiated with Zyklon B gas in the gas chambers or from starvation, disease or exhaustion.

"The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history,"
British junior Education Minister Jim Knight said.

"Six million people died not for what they had done but simply for who they
were. What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialised and
mechanised the process of killing people became at Auschwitz.

"It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with
some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out. Every
young person should have an understanding of this."

The programme is set to last an initial period of three years, and of the
300 pounds (400 euros or 590 dollars) that each trip will cost, the government
will contribute 200 pounds, with schools expected to raise the remaining 100
pounds.

The trips themselves will last one day, with students leaving early in the
morning and arriving home late at night.