Israeli defence minister visits Auschwitz

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak paid a private visit to the World War II-era Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps Thursday, the Auschwitz museum said.

Accompanied by his wife, Barak visited part of the museum devoted to the Holocaust as well as buildings housing the former Auschwitz camp's infamous crematoria and gas chambers, said a statement from the museum in Oswiecim, southern Poland.

Leading a small delegation, the Israeli official then visited the Birkenau camp, located some three kilometres (1.8 miles) from the Auschwitz site.

Barak laid a floral tribute and sang the Israeli national anthem with others present in front of a monument honouring the victims of the twin Nazi death camps.

On Wednesday, Barak met Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Defence Minister Bogdan Klich in the Polish capital Warsaw.

Between 1940-45, Nazi Germany killed some 1.1 million people at the twin Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland.

The vast majority of the victims were Jews, targeted by Nazi Germany's campaign of genocide against all of Europe's Jews.

Polish anti-Nazi partisans, gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war were among the camp's other victims.