A Jewish leader became trapped inside Auschwitz concentration camp overnight after getting locked in while filming a TV show on the 70th anniversary of its liberation.

Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, sparked a minor diplomatic incident after police were called to the Nazi death camp when the group set off a security alarm.

They had been granted permission to film an episode for Italian TV programme, Matrix, live from the site near Krakow.

But after finishing the show, they found themselves locked in the complex at around 11pm.

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Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, became trapped inside Auschwitz concentration camp overnight after getting locked in while filming a TV show on the 70th anniversary of its liberation

No-one responded to their calls for help, it was reported by the ANSA news agency.

After several hours, the group of five, which included journalist David Parenzo, escaped out of a window, setting off an alarm that sent police rushing to the scene.

Italian diplomats were forced to step in to secure their release and they were able to return to Rome.

The incident happened as world leaders joined around 300 Auschwitz survivors at the site of the former Nazi death camp yesterday to mark 70 years since its liberation by Soviet troops.

The gathering in southern Poland marked perhaps the last major anniversary that survivors of the camp will be able to attend in numbers, given the youngest are now in their 70s.

Some 1,500 attended the 60th anniversary.

Some 1.5 million people, mainly European Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged and burned at the camp during World War Two, before the Red Army entered its gates in winter 1945.

Journeying back to hell: Auschwitz survivors visit the Birkenau Memorial as more than 300 attended the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation by Soviet forces in 1945

Haunting reminder: Auschwitz survivors enter the camp under the infamous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign yesterday for commemorations

It has become probably the most poignant symbol of a Holocaust that claimed six million Jewish lives across Europe.

The presidents of Poland, Germany, France were among hundreds attending the commemoration in a giant tent erected over the brickwork entrance to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, part of the complex that is now a museum.

The railway tracks that bore Jews in wagons from all across Europe to their deaths were lit up gold, the countryside around covered in deep snow.

David Wisnia, an 88-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, said on Monday that the Holocaust was 'almost impossible for a human mind to comprehend.'

A choir boy as a child at Warsaw's Great Synagogue, which was blown up by Nazi forces in 1943, Wisnia sang a memorial prayer in Hebrew yesterday.