McAleese to join world leaders at Auschwitz remembrance

President Mary McAleese is to join world leaders at Auschwitz in Poland to mark the liberation of the Nazi death camp, it emerged today.

Heads of state will join former prisoners and soldiers at the site to remember the millions of Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s fascist regime during the Second World War.

President McAleese will place a lighted candle at the Monument to the Victims of Fascism as part of tomorrow’s 60th anniversary of the last days of the death camp.

She will also sign a Remembrance Book on behalf of the people of Ireland at the special ceremony.

Former prisoners at the concentration camp and ex-soldiers of the Russian Red Army who liberated the camp will be joined by Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation and Moshe Katsav, the President of Israel will also attend the event.

President Jacques Chirac of France, President Horst Koehler of Germany and Vice-President Dick Cheney of the United States will also be among the heads of state at the ceremony.

The mass killings ended on January 27 1945, when the Russian army arrived and Nazi guards at the camp ran away.

The dying did not end immediately, however, as hundreds of people died in the following weeks from illness and disease or from the shock of eating food after years of hunger.

The Auschwitz complex, the largest Nazi death camp, has become a metaphor for the Holocaust in which at least six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others were murdered between 1942 and 1945.

Auschwitz I, opened in a former Polish army barracks in April 1940 and held about 15,000 prisoners.

Auschwitz II, or Birkenau was built about 3km from the original camp in 1941 as an extermination centre.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre claimed Nazi staff at Auschwitz killed 6,000 people a day in four gas chambers.