Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The gates of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland, circa 1965. The sign above reads "Arbieit Macht Frei," or "Work Makes You Free." German police on Monday arrested a 93-year-old man suspected of having been a guard at the camp.

German state police on Monday arrested a 93-year-old man suspected of being a former guard at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

A news release did not name the suspect, in accordance with German law, but it said he had been arrested on suspicion of being an accessory to murder.

The suspect had served as a guard at the camp in Poland from the autumn of 1941 until its liberation in early 1945, the prosecutor's office said in the statement.

Following a search of the man’s apartment, the suspect was brought before a judge and was in investigative custody while an arraignment was being prepared, the statement said.

A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to German media reports, the prosecutor’s office had launched an investigation against the man in November 2012.

About 1.1 million people, including 960,000 Jews, died at Auschwitz, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Courtesy Auschwitz Jewish Center

The Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue (c. 1939-1941).

REGENSBURG, Germany -- A synagogue near the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz is on the verge of collapse, officials warned on Wednesday.

The head of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, which maintains the historic building in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim, said in a phone interview that the synagogue is on unstable ground and if it is not reinforced soon, it may crumble.

"There are already small cracks visible," Tomasz Kuncewicz said. "A thorough examination found that the ground is unstable and with heavy rain or something similar, anything can happen."

If the Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue were to collapse, the only surviving Jewish house of prayer in the city would be ruined.

Oswiecim, once an ordinary town home to a large Jewish community, became an international symbol of the Holocaust when Nazi Germany ran its largest and deadliest concentration camp just two miles from the city center during World War II. Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.

"Several synagogues were located in the area, and this was the only one not destroyed by the Nazis," Kuncewicz said.

Jacek Bednarczyk / EPA

Students visit the Chewra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue in Auschwitz, Poland, on Wednesday.

The synagogue itself seems to trace the tragic path of the Jewish community in the area.

Built around 1913, it thrived until the Nazi occupation. During World War II, the interior was gutted and it was used to store ammunition.

After the war and the liberation of the concentration camp, a group of Jewish survivors restored the building provisionally, but it stopped operating when the small group emigrated from Poland shortly thereafter. In the 1970s, the country's communist government nationalized the building and turned it into a carpet warehouse.

It wasn't until 1998 that the synagogue was turned back over to the Jewish community, a historic first in Poland after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. It was rededicated in 2000 in an effort to rekindle the Jewish community that had been so vibrant in the city decades before.

Today, it is not only a place of prayer, but also a historical site and educational center that draws 25,000 visitors each year.

Organizers are seeking $300,000 for the renovation effort, the majority from donations, but they also are asking for help from government agencies.

Kuncewicz said he hoped to start the repairs this spring: "We are working very hard to raise money for this project, to make sure the synagogue will stand."

OSLO -- Norwegian police apologized for the first time Monday for their complicity in the deportation and murder of over 700 Jews during the Nazi occupation in World War II, just months after the prime minister made a formal apology.

"Norwegian police officers participated in the arrest and deportation of Jews," police chief Odd Reidar Humlegaard said on the 70th anniversary of Norway deporting the first group of Jews to Auschwitz.

"It is fitting that I express my regret for the role police played in the arrest and deportation of these completely innocent victims," he said.

State role already acknowledged
Vidkun Quisling, Norway's leader during the Nazi occupation whose name has become a synonym for traitor, ordered the registration of Jews in 1942 and the state apparatus played a complicit role in their eventual deportation.

Norway acknowledged the state's role in 1998 and paid some $60 million to Norwegian Jews and Jewish organizations in compensation for property seized.

Germany's Merkel opens Roma Holocaust memorial in Berlin

But the move fell short of a full apology, causing further national debate and the establishment of a Holocaust research center. Current prime minister Jens Stoltenberg only made a formal apology earlier this year.

Norway's Jewish population rose to around 2,100 by 1942 from 1,700 before the war as refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia fled the continent.

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Authorities eventually deported 772, of whom only 34 survived. Others either stayed in hiding or fled to neighboring Sweden, which protected its Jewish population and also accepted around 8,000 Danish Jews.

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Updated 5:20 p.m. ET: The world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday with a promise never to forget the genocide at Auschwitz during World War II.

Friday was the 67th anniversary of the Nazi camp's liberation by Soviet troops. Jan. 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005, and marked with ceremonies across Europe.

In Poland, Kazimierz Smolen, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor who after World War II became director of the memorial site, died Friday on the anniversary of its liberation.

Smolen died in a hospital in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

Sawicki said soon after Smolen's death the news was announced to Holocaust survivors who had gathered at the vast site of dilapidated barracks still enclosed in barbed-wire fencing, The Associated Press reported. They fell silent for a minute in his honor.

Smolen was born on April 19, 1920, in the southern Polish town of Chorzow Stary. He was a Pole involved in the anti-Nazi resistance who was arrested by the Germans in April 1941 and taken to Auschwitz in one of the early mass shipments of prisoners there. He left the camp on the last transport of prisoners evacuated by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945, nine days before its liberation. He later attributed his survival to good health and extreme luck.

He once explained his decision to return to the camp to manage it as a way of honoring those who were killed there.

"Sometimes when I think about it, I feel it may be some kind of sacrifice, some kind of obligation I have for having survived," he said.

In other gestures of remembrance, Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg apologized for his nation's role in arresting and deporting Jews after it was invaded by Nazi Germany. During the war, 772 Norwegian Jews and Jewish refugees were deported to Germany. Only 34 survived.

He said it's time the nation acknowledges that politicians and other Norwegians took part and expressed "our deep regrets that this could have happened on Norwegian soil." He spoke at a ceremony in Oslo attended by the last surviving Jew in a group of 532 deported from Norway in 1942.

In Turkey, state television on Thursday broadcast the epic French documentary "Shoah," about the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime. It was the first time the film has been aired on public television in a predominantly Muslim country.

"It is a historical event," filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 87, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his home in Paris. "It is extremely important that it is being shown in a Muslim country."

Germany's Parliament also gathered Friday for a special sitting to remember the Holocaust.

Prominent survivor and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki recalled how the Nazi SS informed members of the Warsaw ghetto's Jewish council in July 1942 of plans for the inhabitants' "resettlement" to the east.

Reich-Ranicki, 91, recounted how a "deathly silence" was followed by uproar. He said those present "seemed to sense what had happened: that the sentence had been pronounced for the biggest Jewish city in Europe. The death sentence."

The Nazis set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into inhuman conditions. Most who survived disease and starvation in the ghetto were transported to death camps.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A fitness club in Dubai has brought down a heap of outrage on itself for using a photograph of the Auschwitz concentration camp on an advertisement promoting itself.

The owner of the club, The Circuit Factory, apologized.

The director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham H. Foxman, welcomed the apology but said: "We are increasingly troubled by both the ignorance and mindset of a generation that appears to be so distant from a basic understanding of the Holocaust that it seems acceptable to use this horrific tragedy as a gimmick to bring attention to promoting losing weight."

NBC Sports' Off the Bench has the offending ad itself and more on this.

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