Two sixth-form pupils from every school in England are to visit Auschwitz in a Government-funded initiative to spread understanding of the Holocaust among the younger generation, the Department for Schools has said.
Teenagers chosen for the visits will meet survivors of the Nazi concentration camp where more than a million Jews, gipsies, homosexuals and other persecuted minorities were killed during the Second World War.
They will be shown around the camp's barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, and see documentation and piles of victims' shoes, clothes and hair.
Announcing the £4.65 million programme, schools minister Jim Knight said he hoped the students, aged 16 to 18, would help to educate their classmates on their return home by giving their own accounts of their experience.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families will pay £200 towards the cost of each trip, with schools expected to find the remaining £100. The programme will run for an initial three years, and the department hopes to extend it beyond 2011.
Mr Knight said: "The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history. Six million people died not for what they had done but simply for who they were.
"What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialised and mechanised the process of killing people became at Auschwitz. It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out.
"Every young person should have an understanding of this."
The visits to Auschwitz will be preceded by seminars in which students will hear testimony from a survivor of the camp.
Students taking part will complete their trip to Poland in a day, leaving in the early morning and returning home late at night.
