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Wiesenthal Center decries Auschwitz sign theft (AFP) – 3 hours ago LOS ANGELES — The US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center on Friday called on Poland to arrest and prosecute those responsible for stealing the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign at the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The iconic metal sign, which means "Work Will Set You Free," was stolen just before dawn from the entrance to the former Nazi death camp in present-day Poland, a spokesman for the museum at the site told AFP. Rabbi Marvin Hier from the Wiesenthal Center said the sign was "the defining symbol of the Holocaust because everyone knew that this was not a place where work makes you free, but it was the place where millions of men, women, and children were brought for one purpose only -- to be murdered." "The audacity and boldness of this crime deserves the full attention of the Polish government... to do everything within its power to bring the perpetrators to justice," said Hier in a statement. The Los Angeles, California-based center, a non-governmental organization named after the late Nazi hunter and concentration camp survivor, is one of the world's largest Jewish human rights organizations. Some 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one million of them Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe, mostly killed in the camp gas chambers. The death camp was part of a network that Nazi Germany set up in occupied Eastern Europe aimed at exterminating millions of Jews and others considered undesirable by Adolf Hitler's regime. Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
