Pope Francis has paid a sombre and largely silent visit to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, becoming the third consecutive pontiff to make the pilgrimage to the place where Adolf Hitler’s forces killed more than a million people.

VANDALS desecrated a monument marking the spot in Poland where hundreds of Jews were burned alive during the Second World War.

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, was punched and sprayed with what appeared to be pepper spray by an unidentified man in Warsaw, but escaped without injuries from what police said may have been an anti-Semitic attack.