for stealing two pieces of barbed wire from the Nazi German-era death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau officials said. The man, in his fifties, was detained after a scanner detected the wire in his hand luggage during a security check at the airport in Krakow, 60 kilometres from the site of the camp.
"He admitted having taken the pieces as a souvenir of his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau," said airport spokesman Marcin Pulit. The man's name was not disclosed.
Jaroslaw Mensfelt, spokesman of the Polish state-run memorial and museum at the site, condemned the theft. "This was an act of desecration of a place of memory. Every object here is priceless," he said.
Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's wartime campaign of genocide against Europe's Jews. A year after invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis opened what became a vast complex on the edge of the southern town of Oswiecim - Auschwitz in German. They later expanded it at the nearby village of Brzezinka, or Birkenau.
Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, one million were murdered at the site, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.
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