Israel's leaders, with Iran on their minds, vowed never again to allow the "hand of evil" to kill Jews as the world marked International Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday.
Speaking at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, liberated by Soviet Red Army troops 65 years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a strong Israeli state was the only guarantee for the security of his people.
In Berlin, Israeli President Shimon Peres told the German parliament Iran posed a threat to the whole world and lashed out at its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust and has called for the destruction of the Jewish state.
"From this site, I vow as the leader of the Jewish state that we will never again allow the hand of evil to destroy the life of our people and the life of our state. Never again," Netanyahu said at the Auschwitz ceremony.
"We will not allow the deniers of the Holocaust... to erase or distort the memory (of what happened)," he said, in a clear reference to Ahmadinejad's denial of the Nazis' genocide.
Poland's president and prime minister, the education ministers from nearly 30 nations, including Russia, and about 150 camp survivors attended the commemoration. In subzero temperatures, young Israelis placed candles on top of the crematoria nearby where the Nazis' victims were gassed.
Up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished at Auschwitz, located near the village of Oswiecim in southern Poland, before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps. Others operated by the Germans on occupied Polish territory included Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
