The gate to Auschwitz: 'Work liberates' says the motto

Jack Straw has joined world leaders at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

The foreign secretary was present with heads of state including Jacques Chirac and President McAleese of Ireland at the site where millions of Jews perished under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.

Speaking on Thursday, Straw said: "We have to continuously learn from the lessons of history.

"Future generations cannot be allowed to forget the Holocaust."

He added that Auschwitz "acts as a reminder to us all that the international community must work together to ensure that such atrocities can never be allowed to happen again."

The gathering follows the recent row over Prince Harry's decision to attend a fancy death party dressed as an SS officer.

Senior politicians attending the ceremony lit candles at the Monument to the Victims of Fascism.

Liberation

Former prisoners and soldiers at the death camp - which was liberated by Russian troops on January 27, 1945 - also attended the ceremony.

Other world leaders in attendance included Russian president Vladimir Putin and US vice-president Dick Cheney.

Auschwitz has become a potent symbol of the Holocaust - with its death factories killing upwards of 6,000 Jews a day during the period of 1940-45.

In total over six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others perished during the Holocaust, which will be remembered at ceremonies throughout the world today.

London ceremony

Meanwhile, the prime minister joined senior politicians in Westminster for a service to remember the Holocaust dead.

"We must never dishonour their memory by allowing the ugly poison of racial prejudice and hatred to hold sway again," he said.

"We must pledge ourselves to confront such prejudice wherever it seeks to disfigure our community and we must remember above all that the holocaust did not start with a concentration camp.

"It started with a brick through the shop window of a Jewish business, the desecration of a Synagogue, the shout of racist abuse on the street.

"We recall what humanity at its worst can do.

"And then, in keeping the memory of the holocaust in our minds and hearts, we allow the dead to live again, to teach us, urging us to work for a world free from such prejudice and hatred, for a future shared by all."

Blair added that the Holocaust had been "an act of deliberate, calculated evil such as humanity never in its existence knew before, and let us pray, never knows again".