An American tourist was caught trying to steal part of the rail tracks at the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland, according to officials.

The 37-year-old man faces up to ten years in prison after being charged with attempted theft of an item of cultural importance from the Holocaust memorial site.

He is said to have tried to take a metal part of the tracks where prisoners were unloaded during World War Two.

The man admitted his guilt, according to Malgorzata Jurecka, a police spokeswoman in the town of Oswiecim.

Earlier this month visitors to Auschwitz were asked to stop posing for photos while balancing on its infamous railway tracks.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

It follows a series of thefts and incidents of vandalism at the site where more than 1.1 million Jews were killed.

In 2009 the famous 16ft-wide sign bearing the Nazi slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Will Set You Free) was stolen from the front gate.

It was later found cut into pieces and a former Swedish neo-Nazi was jailed for more than two years for masterminding the theft.

Two British schoolboys were caught stealing artefacts from Auschwitz, including buttons and a razor, in 2015. They were later fined £400 each.

And last year an Israeli teenager was fined for urinating on a memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

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Details of the latest theft emerged as 700 Holocaust artefacts were transported to New York for an exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The exhibits include a vintage German train car like those used to transport men, women and children to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.