Papal Message At Auschwitz

German-born Pope Benedict XVI, visiting Auschwitz as "a son of the German people," on Sunday denounced the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust, and underlined the reality of Hitler's campaign to wipe out Europe's Jews.

"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.

"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence," he said, "a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?"

Benedict walked along the row of plaques 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 suddenly appeared over the camp.

During his remarks, Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II, had visited as a Pole in 1979, he came as "a son of the German people."

"The rulers of the Third Reich 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 German dictator Adolf Hitler during World War II.

As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish town of Oswiecim. Others who died there included Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, or Gypsies, and political opponents of the Nazis.

Benedict did not refer to collective guilt by the German people, but instead focused on the Nazi rulers. He said he was "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness."

He also did not mention the controversy over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, who some say did not do all in his power to prevent Jews from being deported to concentration camps. The Vatican rejects the accusation.

Typically, Benedict did not mention his own personal experiences during the war. Raised by his anti-Nazi father, Benedict was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager against his will and then was drafted into the German army in the last months of the war. He wrote in his memoirs that he decided to desert in the war's last days in 1945 and returned to his home in Traunstein in Bavaria, risking summary execution if caught. In the book, he recounted his terror at being briefly stopped by two soldiers.

He was then held for several weeks as a prisoner of war by U.S. forces who occupied his hometown.

Bells tolled as Benedict walked through the gates of the former death camp, with its metal arch reading "Arbeit Macht Frei", German for "Work Sets you Free," reports CBS News correspondent Sabina Castelfranco.

Benedict's black-clad entourage kept its distance as the pope toured the site.

Other than a brief greeting to the local bishop, Benedict kept silent as he entered the camp, his lips moving in prayer and the wind tossing his white hair as he stopped for a full minute before the Wall of Death, where the Nazis killed thousands of prisoners. Then he was handed a lighted candle, which he placed before the wall.

At the Wall of death, a line of 32 elderly camp survivors awaited Benedict, most of them Catholic. He moved slowly down the line, stopping to talk with each, taking one woman's face in his hands and kissing one of the men on both cheeks.

The former inmates wore different badges showing which group they belonged to during the Nazi regime, reports Castelfranco.

Benedict then visited the dark cell in the basement of one of the buildings, the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar, was executed after voluntarily taking the place of a condemned prisoner with a large family.

Benedict stopped to pray again in the cell, standing before a candle placed there by John Paul during his 1979 visit.

It's the third time Benedict has visited Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau; the first was in 1979, when he accompanied John Paul II, and in 1980, when he came with a group of German bishops while he was archbishop of Munich.

The visit to Auschwitz was the last stop on a four-day trip to Poland, during which Benedict has urged Poles to serve as a beacon of faith in a mostly secular Europe. CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reported the motto of Benedict's trip is "Stand Firm In Your Faith."

Late Saturday, Benedict addressed more than 600,000 pilgrims — many of them young people — on the spacious, grassy Blonia Common and urged them not be discouraged by what he calls creeping secularism.

"Often, Jesus is ignored, he is mocked and he is declared a king of the past who is not for today and certainly not for tomorrow," Benedict said. "A strong faith must endure tests. A living faith must always grow."