AUSCHWITZ Pope Benedict XVI prays for victims of Nazi regime

The pope said the visit was particularly difficult for him as a German.
OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI visited the Auschwitz concentration camp as "a son of the German people" Sunday and asked God why he remained silent during the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust.
Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there. As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow appeared over the camp.
"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible -- and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said later.
"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II, visited the camp as a Pole in 1979, he came as "a son of the German people."
Christian-Jewish ties
"The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the Earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.
"By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."
Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.
As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish town of Oswiecim -- Auschwitz in German. Others who died there included Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma -- or Gypsies, and political opponents of the Nazis.
Benedict did not refer to collective guilt by the German people but instead focused on the Nazi regime. He said he was "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness."
He also did not mention the controversy over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, who some say did not do all in his power to prevent Jews from being deported to concentration camps. The Vatican rejects that accusation.