European People's Party leader visits Auschwitz Museum

Manfred Weber, who leads the European People's Party's (EPP) group in the European Parliament underscored during a visit to the former Nazi German Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland that "Europe must remember what people are capable of."

"In a place like Auschwitz one should be silent", the politician wrote in the visitors book of the Auschwitz Museum, which he visited on Tuesday.

"What is a human being capable of (...) because of inhuman racial hatred. Europe is the answer. Europe must remember what people, specifically Germans, are capable of. Never again!" the head of the EP's largest faction wrote.

Weber laid flowers and paid tribute to all the victims at the Death Wall in the Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz I, where the Germans shot many thousands of people, mainly Poles.

The EPP leader also visited the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where the Germans mass murdered Jews in the gas chambers.

The Germans established the Auschwitz camp in 1940, initially for the imprisonment of Poles. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was established two years later. It became the site for the mass extermination of Jews. There was also a network of sub-camps in the complex. The Germans killed at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, including about 960,000 people of Jewish descent.

The camp was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. In 1947, the camp was declared a national memorial site.