Thieves on Friday stole the infamous Nazi German "Arbeit macht frei" sign from the entrance to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, police said. The sign, which means "Work Will Set You Free", has become a symbol of the horror of the camp where about 1.1 million mainly Jewish prisoners died during World War II, most in the notorious gas chambers.
An Israeli deputy prime minister called the theft "an abominable act" while a leading Israeli holocaust memorial group said it was "a declaration of war." Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt told AFP that thieves carried out an expert operation to take the metal sign just before dawn on Friday.
"It's a profanation of the place where more than a million people were murdered. It's shameful," he said. The five-metre (16-foot) long sign was forged by prisoners on the orders of the Nazis, who set up the camp after invading Poland in 1939. It was not hard to unhook from above the entrance gate "but you needed to know how," Mensfelt said.
A police dog team tracked the thieves while detectives combed through video surveillance footage from the site and neighbouring areas. Poland's ex-president Lech Walesa called the theft "unthinkable". "I hope this turns out to be a sick joke by scrap-metal thieves who didn't know what they were doing," the Nobel prize winner told the TVN24 news channel.
In Israel, Avner Shalev, director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial said "this act constitutes a true declaration of war." "We don't know the identity of the perpetrators but I assume they are neo-Nazis," Shalev said in a statement. "I am certain the Polish government will do everything possible to track down those criminals and put them on trial," he said. Silvan Shalom, Israel's deputy prime minister and regional development minister, branded the theft "an abominable act that amounts to profanation."
"This act demonstrates once again hatred and violence against Jews," said Shalom, who in April represented Israel at the camp's annual March of the Living memorial event. Andrzej Kremer, Poland's deputy foreign minister, told the PAP news agency he was shocked, because the sign was a "key symbol of this death camp".
Mensfelt said it was the first serious case of theft at Auschwitz, near the southern town of Oswiecim, which has been a Polish state-run museum and memorial since the end of World War II. "All leads are being considered, but we are focusing on a theft ordered by a private collector or a group of individuals," Oswiecim police spokeswoman Malgorzata Jurecka told AFP.
"A theft by scrap metal hunters seems less likely, given the professionalism of the thieves," she added. Police offered a 5,000-zloty (1,200-euro/1,700-dollar) reward for information leading to the recovery of the sign or the arrest of the thieves, she said.
Nazi Germany initially set up the camp for Polish resistance fighters in a former barracks in 1940. The Nazis also used such signs at other camps in a cynical propaganda ploy, maintaining the illusion that they were labour camps.
Over years Auschwitz was expanded to become a vast complex, after razing the village of Brzezinka - Birkenau in German. About 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau - one million of them Jews from Poland and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe - some from overwork, starvation and disease, but mostly in the gas chambers.
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