Israel PM opens Auschwitz blueprint exhibit

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday opened an exhibition of the Auschwitz death camp blueprints, saying Jews are again facing calls for their extermination, an apparent reference to Iran.

"There is evil in the world. If it is unstopped it expands, and it is expanding. And it is threatening the same people, the Jewish people, but we know it only starts with the Jewish people," said Netanyahu who has called Iran an "existential threat" to Israel.

"There is a new call for the extermination of the Jewish people," he said at the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the Jewish state was doomed to be "wiped off the map" and has questioned the scale of the Holocaust.

Israel has routinely called for tough measures against Iran, which the West suspects of seeking to develop a weapons capability under the guise of a civil nuclear programme, an accusation Tehran denies.

Israel is widely believed to be the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear power.

"This is test for humanity and we shall see in the coming weeks and coming months how the international community lives up to its responsibility to stop evil before it spreads," the premier said.

Netanyahu was given the rare original blueprints of the Nazi death camp -- some bearing the initials of Heinrich Himmler, chief architect of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews -- by German publisher Bild in Berlin in August.

The documents, which date from 1941-42 and include plans drawn with technical precision for a gas chamber and a crematorium, were discovered in a Berlin apartment in 2008 and later bought by Bild newspaper.

More than one million Jews, Roma and others deemed "sub-human" by Adolf Hitler's regime were killed at Auschwitz, near the Polish city of Krakow, out of a total six million Jews slaughtered by the end of World War II in 1945.

"What you see in this exhibition, in these testimonies is great evil. Unadulterated evil," Netanyahu said, pointing to the yellowed sketches and plans.

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said that at first glance, the documents looked like any regular construction plans -- "but a mute scream emerges from them with terrifying clarity."

Netanyahu was set to travel to Poland later on Monday to attend the anniversary of the January 27, 1945 liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops.