There is especially an abiding confusion about the different kinds of camps which existed in the Nazi

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There is, especially, an abiding confusion about the different kinds of camps which existed in the Nazi archipelago of evil.Broadly speaking, there were labour camps, concentration camps and death camps. Life in the labour and concentration camps, such as Belsen, south of Hamburg, and Dachau, north of Munich, was barbaric Life expectancy was short. These camps had tens of thousands of political prisoners, and resistance activists, from Germany and from occupied countries - and some high-profile Jews.Much of the confusion, in the West, arises because these camps, in the western part of Germany, were liberated by the British and the Americans. They provided the images which were first seared onto the world's memory and conscience: images of walking skeletons in striped uniforms and heaps of emaciated bodies being cleared by bulldozers.But these were not the death camps. Intelligent, educated men believed that they had a right to destroy millions of fellow human beings.

At the same time, they felt it was necessary to lie about, and cover up, what they were doing. (I was astonished by my own ignorance when I visited Auschwitz, even though my father was Jewish, even though some of my distant, Slovakian-Jewish relatives almost certainly died there.)The details are imperfectly known, even to honest, specialist historians, because so much of the evidence was destroyed by the Nazis. The story was further muddied by the Soviet domination of Poland up to 1990 - years when Auschwitz was turned into an "anti-fascist" shrine and the suffering of the Jews was pushed into the background.Did 5,000,000 Jews die in the Holocaust or 6,000,000? Even now, honest historians disagree. The generally accepted figure of 1,100,000 dead in Auschwitz alone (including 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles and 21,000 gypsies) is a "conservative estimate", according to the head archivist of the Polish state museum on the site, Piotr Setkiewicz "It was almost certainly more than that.

These are just the people that we can say with absolute certainty died here."One of the perverted oddities of the Final Solution is the mixture of brazen pride and shame with which it was implemented. The Holocaust began three years after Walt Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 20 years before The Beatles and Swinging London. Auschwitz is part of Modern Times.Today, politicians from 40 countries will travel to the Birkenau camp to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in January 1945. Pre-planned Nazi mass murders were also carried out - it is sometimes forgotten in the West - of hundreds of thousands of Russians and at least 1,500,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, students, priests and randomly seized civilians. The Poles were slaughtered to reduce their country to a slave state, permanently colonised by Germans.On a first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the mind revolts against the proximity of roundabouts and barbed wire, of supermarkets and gas chambers; against the juxtaposition of the death camp and the pleasant Polish town of Oswiecim, now as much part of the European Union as Dorking or Macclesfield In truth, this is no anachronism, but a useful reminder. The chief purpose of Auschwitz-Birkenau was to destroy a race and to obliterate the 800-year-old Jewish-European civilisation. (In this second task, the Nazis succeeded.)Auschwitz was not, in itself, the Holocaust.