The head of the World Jewish Congress made a barbed jibe at Prince Harry's Nazi fancy dress outing today at a solemn ceremony in Berlin launching the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

As Chancellor Schroeder expressed Germany's shame for the Holocaust, Israel Singer, the WJC chairman, told an audience in the city's German Theatre that the lessons of the past were being forgotten.

"While apologists clamour Holocaust fatigue, deniers receive open forums to spread their lies and instructors teaching the Holocaust this week are shouted down by their students in various European countries," Mr Singer said.

In what appeared to be a clear reference to the Prince's decision to wear a German army uniform and swastika armband to a costume party two weeks ago, he added: "And we experience insensitivity towards the Holocaust by Europe's younger generation, sometimes from the highest and most important families."

The jibe came in front of an audience of German and Jewish leaders and survivors of the Auschwitz camp, which was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945. Out of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, more than one million were killed at the camp in southern Poland, most of them gassed to death.

After a picture of Harry wearing the swastika was published around in newspapers around the world, Jewish groups called on Prince Harry to join Britain's delegation at this week's anniversary ceremony at Auschwitz itself - a suggestion that was quickly knocked down by Clarence House.

Herr Schroeder clad in a black suit and tie, made a simple and emotional speech in which he said all his countrymen, even those not alive during the Second World War, bore a "special responsibility" for the Holocaust.

"I express my shame over those who were murdered, and before those of you who have survived the hell of the concentration camps," he said.

"Millions of children, women and men were suffocated with gas by German SS troops and their accomplices, or starved and shot. Jews, Sinti and Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, political opponents, prisoners of war and freedom fighters throughout Europe were utterly destroyed with cold, industrial perfection or enslaved until their deaths."

He added: "The vast majority of Germans alive today are not to blame for the Holocaust, but they do bear a special responsibility."

In France, President Chirac led anniversary events, inaugurating a Holocaust memorial in Paris, including a "Wall of Names" that commemorates the tens of thousands of Jews deported to their deaths from France.

In an address to dignitaries and survivors, he described anti-Semitism as a"perversion that kills" and pledged French support for Israel, whose existence, he said, was justified by the suffering of Jews in World War II.

"I want to say again that anti-Semitism has no place in France. Anti-Semitism is not a point of view. It is a perversion, a perversion that kills. It is a hatred whose roots go to the very depths of evil," he said.

France has seen a rise in recent years of insults and attacks on Jewish people and property -- most of it attributed to young Muslim men angry about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Vatican, in a text released on Tuesday, said that the concentration camps represent one of the darkest chapters of the last century and will forever remain a"shameful stain on the history of mankind."

In New York at a special UN General Assembly dedicated to the anniversary, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said yesterday that the evil perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II must never be allowed to happen again.

"Such an evil must never be allowed to happen again," Mr Annan said."We must be on the watch for any revival of anti-Semitism, and ready to act against the new forms of it that are happening today."

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