Thursday, August 27, 2009

Netanyahu presented with the architectural blueprints for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp


(Reuters).Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on a visit to Germany on Thursday that one lesson Israel drew from the Holocaust was that threats to its existence could not go unchallenged and must be "nipped in the bud".

German journalists handed a portfolio of 29 plans from the Auschwitz death camp discovered last year.

With his wife Sara at his side, Netanyahu said her father's family had been nearly wiped out by Nazis in World War Two: "We cannot allow evil to prepare the mass death of innocents. The most important thing to do is to nip it in the bud," said Netanyahu, alluding to past threats by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map.

Netanyahu thanked the paper, published by Axel Springer Verlag, for giving the documents to him to take back to Yad Vashem in Israel.

"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," the prime minister said. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."