The UN General Assembly today marks its first-ever commemoration of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps as a reminder that the evil of mass murder still threatened the world, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.
The special session, at which the foreign ministers of Israel, Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg are scheduled to speak, is a memorial to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest death camp.
Mr Jorge Semprun, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, addresses the session as the representative of Spain's Foreign Ministry.
Mr Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy US defense secretary, will lead the US delegation, Italy is sending its speaker of the senate and Russia, whose troops freed Auschwitz in 1945, is to be represented by its human rights commissioner.
"The evil that destroyed six million Jews, and others, in those camps is one that still threatens all of us today," Mr Annan said before the event. "It is not something we can consign to the distant past and forget about it."
Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz alone, dying in gas chambers or of starvation and disease. Six million Jews overall were exterminated in Nazi camps and millions of others - including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies - perished or were used as slave labour in the camps.
The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on Thursday.