Shoes Stolen From Former Nazi Death Camp

Eight shoes belonging to prisoners have been stolen from the museum at a former Nazi concentration camp.

Police have launched an investigation into the theft from the state-run museum at the Majdanek camp in eastern Poland.

"An employee noticed shoes were missing during a routine check on Saturday," said museum spokeswoman Agnieszka Kowalczyk-Nowak.

"A hole was cut in the metal mesh on a display containing several hundred shoes in barrack 52.

"After counting the shoes, we found eight missing."

She added: "It's in this barrack where all the shoes are on display so that visitors can begin to comprehend the sheer scale of Nazi crimes."

The museum holds a total of 280,000 shoes belonging to inmates of the camp, with several thousand on display.

Nazi Germany set up the Majdanek camp on the outskirts of the then occupied city of Lublin in 1941 and ran it until 1944.

The camp's museum says that 78,000 prisoners, including 60,000 Jews, died there - around half of those who passed through the camp.

Earlier this month, a sign with the inscription ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work will set you free’) was taken from a gate outside the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.