OSWIECIM (AFP).- British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday honoured Holocaust victims at Nazi Germany's notorious wartime Auschwitz death camp, now a museum in southern Poland.

Cameron walked through the camp's infamous wrought-iron "Arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) entrance gate before viewing an exhibition on the victims.

The British leader stopped in Poland after visiting Turkey to see the camp for the first time.

"I wanted to come and see for myself this place where the darkest chapter of human history happened," Cameron wrote in the Auschwitz memorial book. 

"We must never forget all those who were murdered here and at other camps. We must always remember what happened."

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews, one million of whom died at the camp from 1940 to 1945.

More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the museum.

Ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945 are planned at the site in January.



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