WARSAW (AFP).- A record 1.72 million people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2015, 70 years after the Soviets liberated the former Nazi German death camp, according to the museum at the site in southern Poland.

Museum director Piotr Cywinski said in a statement Monday that a visit to the camp was not just "a history lesson" but also a moment of reflection "on our own responsibility for the state of our world nowadays". 

In 2014, the site drew 1.53 million visitors.

Some 1.1 million people, including a million Jews from across Europe, were killed by Nazi Germany at the camp from 1940 to 1945. The other victims were mostly non-Jewish Poles, gypsies and Soviet prisoners.

Last year, some 425,000 Poles toured the complex, while foreign visitors included 220,000 Britons, 141,000 Americans and 93,000 Germans as well as tens of thousands of others from Italy, Spain, Israel, France and elsewhere.

There was also a marked increase in the number of visitors from South America and North America against 2014.

The museum website www.auschwitz.org saw 25 million visits last year, while its Facebook page topped 200,000 likes. 



© 1994-2016 Agence France-Presse