The Bavarian-born pontiff, who as a teenager had been a reluctant member of the Hitler Youth, seemed to buckle under the weight of history as he walked through the camp’s main gate with its cynical, wrought-iron slogan: Arbeit macht Frei — Work sets you Free.

About 1.5 million people died in the camp, starved, gassed and shot. Throughout his four-day pilgrimage to Poland, a sentimental tribute to his predecessor and mentor John Paul II, Pope Benedict has avoided speaking German, aware that the older generation still regard it as the language of the old oppressor. Instead he has been mixing accented Polish with fluent Italian. The choice of German in Auschwitz was a deliberate gesture — a recognition that he had come to the camp not just as the Head of the Roman Catholic Church, but as a German and as an individual.

“Lord, you are the Lord of peace!” he called out in the short prayer. Just before he spoke, a rainbow broke over the fields that surround the watchtowers and barbed wire perimeter of the camp in southern Poland.

Later, in Italian, he developed the idea of the short prayer: “It is particularly difficult for a Pope that comes from Germany to come here,” he said. “In such a place, no words are possible, just stupefied silence which makes one ask God: ‘Why? Why did you not say anything?’” Pope Benedict said that he would “pray to God not to allow a similar thing to ever happen again”.

As the Pope, 79, walked from the gate, past the red brick barracks of the original Auschwitz camp, he met 32 survivors, mainly Poles who were of his generation. They lined up next to the wall of death, a cement wall covered with tar, where prisoners were beaten and shot. When Pope Benedict — the teenager Josef Ratzinger — was serving as a German anti-aircraft helper, Kazimierz Alvin and the other Poles, decked out in blue and white camp uniforms and propped up on crutches, were struggling to survive in the most notorious extermination camp. The Pope stroked the hair of the women survivors, kissed the cheeks of one: a rare physical gesture from the Pope who, apart from an occasional smile and wave, has been a restrained, overwhelmingly intellectual presence on his visit to Poland.

The Pope seemed to draw entirely within himself in the cell where Maximillian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar was starved to death by the Nazis after offering his life in place of a doomed family father. Kolbe had spent 16 days dying in the cell before being given a lethal injection. “Pray for us,” appealed the Pope standing, hands clenched, in the damp cell lit only by a small grated window too high for a prisoner to look outside.

The trip also signals a shift in the relationship of the Church towards the Holocaust. Pope John Paul tried to make amends for the apparent indifference of the wartime Vatican towards the Jews. The Polish Pope had grown up near Auschwitz and was aware that it was a place of martyrdom for Jews and for Christians. Somehow the camp, transformed into a museum by the postwar Communist authorities, had to become a place where spiritual questions could be raised. Under the Polish Pope, who first visited the camp in 1979, it became a bridge between the two faiths — not always a simple one, as Jews regarded Auschwitz as the world’s biggest Jewish cemetery and opposed any crucifixes or shrines on the terrain.

Pope Benedict yesterday moved the process a step further by acknowledging that the camp was not only a starting point for a dialogue between the Christians and the Jews, but also a place where an ethical conversation had to be held between oppressors and the oppressed. That is why he said his short prayer in German — but only after listening to the prayers of the Jews, the Russians, the Poles and the Roma.

As rain began to fall the Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudraich offered the Jewish lament for the dead, the Kaddish. The previous day Rabbi Schudraich had been beaten in the face and attacked with pepper spray in an apparently anti-Semitic attack in Warsaw.

By visiting the historical sites of the Holocaust, and by emphasising its historical authority, the Pope was showing that Auschwitz could not be tucked away in memory.

The Polish Government has been worried that the Germans — in portraying themselves increasingly as victims of war — were playing down their role under Hitler. Polish diplomats complained that Auschwitz is often described in Germany and elsewhere in Europe as a “Polish concentration camp” — blurring the distinction between victims and perpetrators. The Government seemed satisfied yesterday that the Pope had made the point strongly enough — Auschwitz was a Nazi German camp.

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