Sapa-AFP | 20 May, 2013 

Muslim clerics from around the world will next week visit Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland, as part of a Holocaust awareness and anti-genocide programme .

“This is an opportunity for imams who are influential in their communities to look at the Holocaust first-hand and go to Auschwitz to see what that kind of hatred led to,” Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said on Friday.

“It’s to make sure that civilisation doesn’t fail again.”

The visiting imams are from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the US.

They will also visit a new museum in the Polish capital, Warsaw, the exhibits at which focus on centuries of Jewish life before the Holocaust, John C Taylor, of the US State Department’s office of international religious freedom, said on Friday.

Meetings with local Catholic, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders are also planned.

“If we want the world to remember the horrors of the Holocaust so that genocide against the Jews, or anyone else, should never happen again, we are obliged to make community leaders understand what happened,” Schudrich said.

Muslim leaders last visited Auschwitz in 2011 as part of an inter-faith delegation that included 100 Jewish and Christian leaders from the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

More than a million people, most of them European Jews, were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, two adjoining death camps run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1940 until their liberation on January 27 1945.

There were six Nazi death camps in occupied Poland, home to pre-war Europe’s biggest Jewish community.