Pope Benedict visited the Auschwitz death camp as "a son of Germany" on Sunday and asked God why he remained silent during the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust.
He also met former inmates and viewed an execution wall and starvation cells where some of the 1.5 million victims died.
The Pontiff, 79, walked under the entry gate's infamous motto "Arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) to tour the main Auschwitz camp, the nerve center for a huge complex serving Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of wiping out Jews.
Pope Benedict walked along the row of plaques (in the pic) at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there. As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow appeared over the camp.
The rulers of the Nazi Party wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.
"By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."
Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, the killing of six million Jews by the forces of Adolf Hitler during the Second World War
"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said later.
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