European leaders called yesterday for concrete steps to prevent genocide around the world, warning that more needed to be done to halt the spread of racist violence and propaganda 55 years after the Holocaust.
A conference in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, attended by about 20 presidents and prime ministers also urged governments to open their archives and release more documents on the Holocaust, in which German Nazis killed six million Jews.
"Yes, we have learned, but evidently not enough," the Swedish Prime Minister, Mr Goran Persson, said in a closing address to delegates from 48 countries.
"There are frightening similarities between some of the pictures we see today and images of the Holocaust. As the 21st century dawns there are people being killed for no other reason than their existence," he said.
Mr Persson vowed to tighten attempts to halt the spread of neo-Nazi propaganda and white power music in Sweden, where several people have died in recent racist violence.
A final declaration from the conference, the biggest to date on the Holocaust, pledged to keep alive the memory of the killing of Jews by Nazis through education, research and remembrance as the last elderly survivors passed away.
"The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning . . . The magnitude of the Holocaust, planned and carried out by the Nazis, must be forever seared in our collective memory," it said.
"With humanity still scarred by genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia, the international community shares a solemn responsibility to fight those evils."
European leaders also expressed concern about developments in Austria, where a farright party led by Mr Jorg Haider, a populist politician who has played down Nazi crimes in the past, is poised to enter government.
Mr Persson joined Britain on Thursday in declaring January 27th an annual Holocaust remembrance day in Sweden.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Wim Kok of the Netherlands made a formal apology yesterday to Dutch victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their relatives.
Until now, Mr Kok has only expressed regret at the treatment of holocaust survivors returning to the Netherlands from Nazi-run war camps.
"An expression of regret is an apology. It's really saying we're sorry," Mr Kok told his weekly parliamentary press briefing in The Hague.
PA adds:
An internal Auschwitz document, which ordered that building plans for the crematoria at the camp were to be kept secret, showed that they had been "committed to genocidal use", the High Court in London heard yesterday.
The existence of the "house order", dated May 5th, 1943, emerged during historian David Irving's cross-examination of Auschwitz expert, Prof Robert van Pelt, who is giving evidence for the defence in Mr Irving's libel action over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier".
Prof van Pelt told Mr Justice Gray that the first trial gassing in Crematorium Two - where ultimately 500,000 people were to die - took place in March 1943, with nearly all the crematoria in operation by May.
During 1944, he added, there were seven gas chambers in use at the camp.
Mr Irving, who accepts there were gassings on a limited basis but denies the existence of "factories of death", said that the order covered blue-prints for the crematoria.