An iron gate stolen from a Nazi concentration camp has been returned to its original site.

The gate bearing the infamous slogan "Arbeit macht frei" - work sets you free - disappeared from the Dachau concentration camp, in southern Germany, in 2014.

Following an anonymous tip-off, it was discovered under a tarpaulin in a car park in Norway two years later - with no evidence as to how it got there.

No arrests have been made and at a ceremony marking the return of the gate, the chairman of the International Dachau Committee urged police to step up their investigation into the theft.

Image: The gate was found in a car park in Ytre Arna, western Norway

Jean-Michel Thomas said he was "deeply shocked by the desecration of the site dedicated to the memory of all the victims of the camp".


Mr Thomas added that the theft was an attempt to "remove a trace, a symbol of all that is represented by the inscription 'Arbeit macht frei'".

The gate, which was originally set into a larger gate at the entrance of the death camp, will now be placed in a museum at Dachau.

Gabriele Hammermann, director of the camp's memorial, said officials "almost gave up hope" of finding it.

Image: The gate is to be placed in a museum at Dachau

She said: "This was one of the worst attacks on the Dachau camp memorial and even if we do not know who the perpetrators were, we assume that this was a specific attack on this place and that is how the survivors and their families see it too.

"That is why it is very important for them that the investigations continue."

Dachau concentration camp, near Munich, opened within two months of Adolf Hitler becoming German chancellor in 1933.

More than 200,000 people from across Europe were held there and some 41,000 died before it was liberated by US troops in April 1945.

Image: Dachau concentration camp was opened in 1933

The gate at Dachau is not the first symbol to have been stolen from a concentration camp in recent years.

In 2009, a sign bearing the same inscription was stolen from Auschwitz by Swedish neo-Nazi Anders Hoegstroem, who was caught and jailed for two and a half years.

Five years later, shoes belonging to prisoners were taken from a museum at the Majdanek camp in eastern Poland.