German-born Pope Benedict XVI walked alone under the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gate at the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
OSWIECIM (Poland): German-born Pope Benedict XVI walked alone under the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gate at the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau as he began a poignant visit to the site where Hitler's Germany killed 1.1 million people in World War II.
As church bells rang in the southern town of Oswiecim -- the Polish name for Auschwitz -- a solemn Benedict, his hands clasped in prayer, walked in silence the 200 metres to the execution wall wedged between prisoner blocks 10 and 11, where the Nazis summarily shot thousands of prisoners.
His face grave, Benedict stood a few moments in prayer, removing his hat before bowing solemnly and placing a bowl containing a lighted candle before the grim wall.
The 79-year-old pontiff then greeted a line of 32 survivors, men and women, who were waiting to meet him.
Some grasped his hands warmly, some knelt to kiss his papal ring, many seemed eager to thank him for visiting the camp.
Benedict clasped the hands of the first survivor waiting in line, a woman, wearing the striped scarf that Polish political prisoners wore at the camp.
Passing down the line, an elderly Polish man kissed the Pope on both cheeks, a gypsy survivor of the camp pressed the Pope's hand to his lips.
Henryk Mandelbaum, 83, wearing the distinctive striped cap of the Sonderkommando -- Jewish prisoners who emptied the gas chambers where their fellow Jews perished -- kissed the papal ring.
The Pope, who earlier said he would visit the Auschwitz camp as a "son of the German people," was later expected to utter a prayer in German for the victims of Nazi brutality.
Benedict, a member of Hitler Youth as a teenager, afterwards descended into the bowels of the grim barracks to pray before a lighted candle in the cell where Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe died in 1941.
Kolbe had offered to take the place of a prisoner whom the Nazis had sentenced to death by starvation.
Benedict, on the last day of a four-day visit to Poland, was later to recite a speech expected to focus on reconciliation between Germans and Poles after more than 60 years of distrust caused by the German occupation of the country during World War II.
It was Benedict's third visit to Auschwitz. As Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich, he accompanied the Polish-born John Paul II during his first visit to the camp as pope in 1979. A year later, he came as part of a delegation of German bishops.
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