The King will become the first British head of state to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau when he tours the former Nazi concentration camp to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation.
Charles will travel to Poland to commemorate the milestone with foreign monarchs, presidents, prime ministers and Holocaust survivors invited to a service at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial.
During a recent Buckingham Palace reception ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day – held annually on January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated – the King said: “I feel I must go for the 80th anniversary, (it’s) so important.”
More than a million people, mostly Jews but also Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and other nationalities, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War as part of the Holocaust in which six million Jewish men, women and children were killed.
The camp was liberated by soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front who opened the gates on January 27 1945.
The ceremony will be held in front of the infamous gates of the former Nazi concentration camp which had the words Arbeit Macht Frei – “work sets you free” – above it.
Auschwitz survivors will address the invited guests who are expected to include France’s President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and Spain’s King Philip VI and Queen Letizia.
Survivors will place a light in front of a freight train carriage – a symbol of the event – and the King with other heads of state and Government will lay lights in memory of those who died during the Holocaust.
After the ceremony Charles will walk through the gates to view personal items confiscated from victims when they entered the camp and lay a wreath at a reconstruction of the Death Wall, the site where several thousand people, mainly Polish political prisoners, were executed.
