Starmer visits Auschwitz and vows to fight the antisemitism he sees growing in the UK

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday visited the site of Nazi German extermination camp Auschwitz, voicing his “sheer horror” at what he saw and vowing that he would fight the growing antisemitism which is causing fears to rise among Jews including in Britain.

Starmer visited the site in southern Poland — an area under German occupation during World War II — after a visit to Ukraine on Thursday. He later traveled to Warsaw to meet with President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk for talks on security and defense cooperation.

“Nothing could prepare me for the sheer horror of what I have seen in this place. It is utterly harrowing,” he said in a statement released after his morning visit to the memorial site with his wife, Victoria, who is Jewish. “The mounds of hair, the shoes, the suitcases, the names and details, everything that was so meticulously kept, except for human life.”

His visit came before the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation on Jan. 27, 1945. King Charles III will be among the dignitaries attending a somber ceremony where the spotlight will be on the dwindling number of survivors of the Nazi atrocities.

From 1940-45, around 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Roma and Sinti, Russian prisoners of war and others, were killed in the gas chambers or died of starvation, hard labor and disease at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the complex of concentration, forced labor and death camps that has become the most notorious of Germany’s sites of mass killing in wartime occupied Europe. About 90% of the victims were Jewish.

Starmer said in his statement that the visit made him see more clearly how the industrial-level killing didn’t result from the evil deeds of a few individuals, but from “a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary people who each played their part in constructing this whole industry of death.”

He noted the antisemitism that has been growing since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.

“Time and again we condemn this hatred, and we boldly say ‘never again.’ But where is never again, when we see the poison of antisemitism rising around the world in aftermath of Oct. 7? Where is never again, when the pulse of fear is beating in our own Jewish community, as people are despicably targeted once again for the very same reason, because they are Jewish,” he said.

The museum said the Starmers were greeted by its director, Piotr Cywiński, and were shown cans of the gas Cyclone B used for killing, as well as the crematorium and gas chamber at Auschwitz I, the original camp. They also saw personal items stolen from victims, including shoes, glasses and Jewish prayer robes.

In the second part of their visit, they saw the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, including the railway ramp where armed German troops and doctors carried out a selection of Jews deported to the camp, determining who would be killed immediately, as well as the ruins of a gas chamber and crematorium.

The Starmers laid a wreath at the Execution Wall at Auschwitz I, paying tribute to all the victims of the camp, and lit a candle at a monument at Birkenau, where most of the Jews were murdered.

Starmer’s center-left Labour Party has struggled with accusations of antisemitism. In 2020, the U.K. equalities watchdog in a scathing report found that Labour officials failed to stamp out antisemitism and committed “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” under Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

When Starmer became leader in 2020, he vowed to root out prejudice and restore relations between Labour and the Jewish community. Corbyn, who refused to accept the report’s findings of antisemitism, was barred from standing as a Labour candidate in the 2024 election and now sits in Parliament as an independent.

Reports of antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in the U.K., according to the Community Security Trust, a Jewish safety organization. It logged 1,978 self-reported incidents in the first half of 2024, an increase of 105% over the same period in 2023. It said the surge was a result of reactions to the October 2023 attack in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.

Most of the incidents were verbal harassment, but the CST recorded 121 cases it classed as assault and 83 incidents of damage and desecration to Jewish property in the first half of 2024.