Two British teenagers, fined in June for stealing artefacts from the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, will now face trial for the same offence, a Polish prosecutor said on Wednesday.



The two, back in England, had been given a one-year probation along with the fine after pleading guilty in June, then released by Polish authorities. But they had since reversed their plea to not guilty, prompting the new charges, said Mariusz Słomka from the prosecutor’s office in Oświęcim, the southern Polish city where the Auschwitz camp is located.

If found guilty, they could face up to 10 years in prison for “stealing objects of historical value”, said Słomka. He said the charges were delivered on Tuesday to the court in the city of Kraków.

Born in 1997 and 1998, the boys – both minors when they were detained in Poland in June – were students at the Perse school, a private facility near Cambridge in southern England.

They were detained near barracks where the prisoners’ personal items used to be sorted, Paweł Sawicki, spokesman for a museum at the Polish site, said at the time.

“The guards saw them dig in the ground. They detained them and discovered that they were in possession of shards of glass, buttons, a hair clipper and bits of metal,” he said.

After the incident, the Perse school said the two pupils admitted taking items of historical importance that they “found on the ground”, and said there would be a “full and thorough investigation”.

The boys were fined 1,000 złoty (£170), released and left Poland in June.

The camp, which has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust, is visited by more than a million people from across the world each year.

Several people have tried to make off with barbed wire, while one particularly brazen gang walked out with the camp’s infamous Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”) sign in 2009.

The mastermind of that theft, Swedish neo-Nazi Anders Högström, was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

The metal sign was eventually recovered cut up into three pieces, leading museum officials to display a replica above the entrance.

One million European Jews died at the camp set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in 1940-1945. More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the museum.