Thought this was an interesting carry through as there was so much
weeping and gnashing of teeth at the time...

UN says yet to decide on Auschwitz camp renaming

WARSAW (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Friday it would decide
next year whether to rename the Auschwitz death camp, a U.N. World
Heritage site in Poland, to make clear that it was operated by Germans
not Poles.

Earlier this month Poland said it had won approval to change the site's
name from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "the Former Nazi German
Concentration Camp of Auschwitz." But a United Nations spokesman denied
a decision had been made.

Roni Amelan, a press officer at the U.N.'s Paris-based education and
culture arm        UNESCO, said its World Heritage Committee formally
acknowledged Poland's request but that a final decision would only be
taken next year.

"Poland had informed the Committee through UNESCO it wants to change
the name of the concentration camp and the Committee decided that such
a decision would require more consultations internationally," Amelan
told Reuters.

Six decades after the Holocaust, many Poles fear the world is
forgetting that it was German Nazis who set up the Auschwitz death camp
in occupied Poland during World War Two.

More than a million Jews from across Europe died at Nazi hands in
Auschwitz and the linked camp of Birkenau.

Warsaw points to references to "Polish gas chambers" or the "Polish
concentration camps" popping up in world media as evidence Poles are
wrongly portrayed as collaborators in the Nazis' drive to exterminate
European Jewry.

In April, Poland formally asked UNESCO to change the camp's name on the
list of World Heritage sites. After initial reservations, Jewish
organizations and        Israel backed the plan and UNESCO's World
Heritage Committee agreed to consider it.

In a communique following its meeting in Vilnius earlier this month,
the committee said it "welcomed" the proposal but that it needed
further international consultations. It said a final decision would be
made at its next year's meeting.

Warsaw saw the statement as a sign of agreement, prompting Culture
Minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski to call it a "victory for both Poland and
historical truth."

German forces occupying Poland set up Auschwitz in southern Poland in
1940 as a labor camp for Polish prisoners, gradually expanding it into
a vast labor and death camp that became the centerpiece of their plans
to kill all European Jews.

Between 1.2 and 1.5 million people died there, most of them Jews.
Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies,
homosexuals, people with disabilities and prisoners of conscience or
religious faith were also killed.

Poland has long battled accusations by some Jewish and Western
commentators that Poles were willing Nazi helpers during the war --
accusations driven by documented incidents of Polish anti-Semitism and
complicity in the Holocaust.

Poles argue that such cases were isolated and point out that 3 million
of their ethnic kin perished during the bloody German occupation. Some
were killed for trying to save their Jewish compatriots.

George