Polish police find stolen Auschwitz sign

WARSAW -— Polish police have found the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”) sign that was stolen from the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz after a major three-day hunt.

Police said they had arrested five suspects.

Police said the sign was found on Sunday night (December 20) in northern Poland, the opposite end of the country from where the Auschwitz museum is located and where it disappeared before dawn on Friday (December 18).

The five-metre sign was found cut into three pieces, police said.

The theft set off an international outcry at the disappearance of one of the most chilling and best-known symbols of the Holocaust.

The Auschwitz museum and other institutions offered a reward of nearly 30,000 euros (almost $A50,000) for information leading to the recovery of the sign and the arrest of the thieves.

Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at the camp during World War II as part of Nazi Germany’s extermination program, and Auschwitz has come to symbolize the Holocaust in which six million Jews perished.

Earlier on Sunday (December 20), Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called on Poland to act to find “these twisted criminals that desecrated the place where over a million Jews were murdered”.

“The sign is of the deepest historical importance to the Jewish people and the whole world, and is a tombstone for more than a million Jews,” Netanyahu said.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said: “I am shocked and outraged by the theft of a recognizable symbol of Nazi cynicism and cruelty,”

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