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Britain will help fund two students from every school in England to visit Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust, in a bid to help teach the lessons o

The sixth-form students, who are typically between 16 and 18 years old, will meet with survivors of the Holocaust, and will be shown the camp's barracks, see inmates' registration documents, and piles of victims' clothes, shoes and hair.

Founded in 1947 at the site of the Nazi-era death camp, the state-run Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Oswiecim, received 1.22 million visitors in 2007.

Historians estimate 1.1 million people died at the hands of Poland's German occupiers at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945, either asphyxiated with Zyklon B gas in the notorious gas chambers or from starvation, disease or exhaustion.

"The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history," junior education minister Jim Knight said.

"Six million people died not for what they had done but simply for who they were. What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialised and mechanised the process of killing people became at Auschwitz.

"It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out. Every young person should have an understanding of this."

The programme is set to last an initial period of three years, and of the 300 pounds (400 euros, 590 dollars) that each trip will cost, the government will contribute 200 pounds, with schools expected to raise the remaining 100 pounds.

The trips themselves will last one day, with students leaving early in the morning and arriving home late at night.

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Last Edited Date : February 4 2008 9:50 am