Poland says UN to rename Auschwitz death camp

WARSAW, June 27 (Reuters) The United Nations has accepted Poland's request to rename the Auschwitz death camp on its list of World Heritage sites to make clear it was run by Germans not Poles, the Polish government announced today.

Auschwitz and the linked Birkenau camp in Poland would be known as ''Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German Concentration and Death Camp'', Culture Minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski told a news conference in Warsaw.

But a spokesman for the Paris-based UN education and culture arm UNESCO said he could not confirm the news. Last year, Poland announced prematurely that the change had been made.

''UNESCO has made a decision as a result of Poland's request to change the name of Auschwitz Birkenau to reflect the historical truth,'' Ujazdowski said, with the Israeli ambassador at his side. ''This is a victory for truth''.

More than a million Jews from across Europe were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz and Birkenau in occupied Poland during World War Two. Many Poles worry that the world is forgetting the camps were set up by the Germans.

Warsaw points to references to ''Polish gas chambers'' or the ''Polish concentration camps'' in world media as evidence Poles are wrongly portrayed as collaborators with the Nazis in killing Jews.

Last year, Poland formally asked UNESCO to change the camp's name. Jewish organisations and Israel backed the plan after initial reservations. UNESCO's World Heritage Committee has been meeting in New Zealand this week.

German forces occupying Poland set up Auschwitz in southern Poland in 1940 as a labour camp for Polish prisoners, gradually expanding it into a vast labour and death camp that became the centrepiece of their plans to kill all European Jews.

Between 1.2 and 1.5 million people died there, most of them Jews. Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and prisoners of conscience or religious faith were also killed.

Poland has long battled accusations by some Jewish and Western commentators that Poles were willing Nazi helpers during the war -- accusations driven by documented incidents of Polish anti-Semitism and complicity in the Holocaust.

Poles argue that such cases were isolated and point out that 3 million of their ethnic kin perished during the bloody German occupation. Some were killed for trying to save their Jewish compatriots.

Reuters NY KP2042