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It stands as the starkest reminder of the Nazi genocide machine.

The Auschwitz extermination camp, where more than a million died during the Second World War, was the chilling centre-piece of Hitler's Final Solution.

But today the camp is rotting away and needs a £120million restoration if it is to be preserved as a haunting yet necessary memorial to the inhumane horrors inflicted on its prisoners.

As one British volunteer put it: "It's a warning to the world that the Holocaust should never happen again."

The wooden guard towers here are splintering and the barracks - where up to 10 prisoners were forced to cram into each slatted bunk - are falling down.

Auschwitz, liberated more than 65 years ago by Soviet troops, was built on boggy ground between two rivers in southern Poland by untrained prisoners.

So the high groundwater and bad drainage has rotted the foundations.

The worst affected part is Auschwitz II - Birkenau - which is just a short drive from the main complex.

On arrival there, the infamous main entrance dubbed the Gate To Hell dominates the flat landscape.

The sheer scale of the death camp, which stretches as far as the eye can see, is shocking.

This place was literally the end of the line for the Jews who arrived by rail in their thousands. Families were separated on the platform into two groups by the flick of a Gestapo finger.

The weak, ill or disabled were taken to one of four huge gas chambers, where their lives were extinguished.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/10/22/auschwitz-needs-120million-restoration-115875-22
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