Auschwitz May Be Renamed to Reinforce Link With Nazi Era

Poland has asked the United Nations to change the title of the Auschwitz concentration camp to remind visitors that it was built and run by Nazi Germany.

In a sign of acute historic sensitivities over the camp, where 1 million Jews died, Warsaw wants to change its official name to Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Polish government made the request to Unesco, which listed Auschwitz as a world heritage site in 1979, after newspapers referred to the camp as Polish during the coverage of the 60th anniversary of its liberation. In a leading article marking Holocaust Memorial Day in January last year the Guardian mistakenly referred to "Polish gas chambers and crematoria".

Jan Kasprzyk, of the Polish culture ministry, told the PAP news agency that Warsaw feared new generations would believe the Nazis' largest concentration camp was built in the name of the Polish people. Poland was occupied by the Nazis between 1939 and 1940. "The former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was definitively associated with the criminal activities of the national socialist Nazi regime in Germany. However, for the contemporary, younger generations ... that association is not universal. The proposed change in the name leaves no doubt as to what the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was."

Unesco will consider the name change at a world heritage committee meeting in Latvia in July. A Unesco spokeswoman said name changes were usually nodded through, though Auschwitz will be more complicated because the German government will have to be consulted.

Auschwitz and Birkenau, built near the Polish town of Oswiecim, are two of the most notorious names associated with Nazi Germany. It is estimated that 1.1 million people died at the camp, of whom 1 million were Jews, mostly from Poland. Most of them were killed in gas chambers.

Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said she sympathised with the Polish government. "I can understand why Poland wants to change the name," she said. "But the real question is how to protect the site and keep alive memories of the Holocaust for the time when there are no more survivors. The challenge is to prevent the site being rebuilt because there have been attempts to build a shopping mall and a nightclub nearby."