• Muslim and Jewish leaders paid 'historic' visit side-by-side to former Nazi death camp Auschwitz on Thursday
  • Saudi head of Muslim World League, Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa led Islamic prayers at monument 
  • American Jewish Committee leader said it was 'most senior Islamic leadership delegation to visit Auschwitz'
  • It came as the world marked the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation, where over 1 million people died 

Muslim and Jewish leaders have today honoured Holocaust victims during what they termed an 'historic' joint visit to the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz, days ahead of the 75th anniversary of its liberation.

The Saudi head of the Mecca-based Muslim World League (MWL) called the visit to the Holocaust site by some 60 senior Muslim religious and community leaders from across the globe 'a sacred duty and a profound honour.'

MWL secretary general Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa knelt and bowed to the ground as he led Islamic prayers next to the memorial monument honouring the more than one million people - mostly European Jews - that Nazi Germany killed at Auschwitz.

The AJC said that Al-Issa, who is based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, led a delegation of 62 Muslims, including 25 prominent religious leaders, from some 28 countries during the 'groundbreaking' visit.

At one point, they prayed with their heads pressed on the ground at Birkenau, the largest part of the camp and the most notorious site of Germany's mass murder of European Jews. 

The AJC delegation included members of the organization, among them children of Holocaust survivors.

To be here, among the children of Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish and Islamic communities, is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,' Al-Issa said. 'The unconscionable crimes to which we bear witness today are truly crimes against humanity. That is to say, a violation of us all, an affront to all of God's children.' 

The visit came ahead of memorial ceremonies next Monday at the former Auschwitz camp marking 75 years since the Soviet Red Army liberated it on January 27, 1945.

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory it occupied across Europe.

Of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until its liberation in 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's 'Final Solution' of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.

Once Europe's Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90 percent of its 3.3 million pre-war Jewish citizens killed under Nazi German occupation between 1939 and 1945.

The visit to the concentration camp by MWL delegates comes as Saudi Arabia works to be seen abroad as a moderate and modernizing country following decades of adherence to a hard-line interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. 

The Muslim World League, under al-Issa's leadership, has embraced the effort.  

Across the globe, people marked 75 years since the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz death camp on Thursday. World leaders denounced the rising threat of anti-Semitism and vowed never to forget the lessons of the Holocaust at a solemn ceremony in Jerusalem. 

The World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, the largest-ever summit of its kind, drew more than 45 world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain's Prince Charles, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. 

By Daily Mail