Pope calls Nazi camps dire 'symbols of evil'

Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that Nazi concentration camps were "extreme symbols of evil" and hell on earth.

The German-born pontiff, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth, was remembering two saints who had died at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

"The Nazi (death camps), like any extermination camps, can be considered extreme symbols of evil," Benedict said.

They are a symbol of "the hell that comes to earth when man forgets God and replaces him, usurping his right to decide what is right and what is wrong, to give life and death," Benedict told pilgrims gathered for Sunday's traditional Angelus prayer.

The pope cited two 20th-century figures who were canonized under his predecessor, Pope John Paul II: Edith Stein, a Jewish-born Carmelite nun who was killed at Auschwitz and made a saint in 1998; and Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar who sacrificed his life at the death camp so that a man with a family could live and was made a saint in 1982.