Far-right Polish nationalists organised an anti-Semitic protest during a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony at Auschwitz.

The small group of hardline activists held their demonstration inside the former concentration camp at the same time as the official Holocaust commemorations on Sunday.

The 50 protestors from the Polish Independence Movement were led by Piotr Rybak, who was once jailed for burning an effigy of a Jew.

Mr Rybak told reporters they were there to oppose the official – and historically accurate – narrative that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis with the active collaboration of some Poles.

"It's time to fight against Jewry and free Poland from them,” Mr Rybak said, a Polish newspaper reported.

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

“The Jewish nation and Israel is doing everything to change the history of the Polish nation.”

At the same time as the Polish nationalists demonstrated, politicians including the prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki and other officials gathered inside the grounds of Auschwitz to hold the annual commemoration marking the liberation of the death camp on 27 January 1945.

Survivors of the Holocaust placed flowers at an execution wall inside the camp, which has been turned into an open-air museum.

They wore striped scarves with the red letter P, similar to the uniforms marking them out as Poles which the Nazi regime forced them to wear.

Christian and Jewish religious figures then led joint prayers for all the victims of the concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, including Poles as well as Jews.

Far-right campaigners have claimed for years the official Holocaust commemorations diminish the place of Polish victims.

The Polish Independence Movement activists laid their own wreaths and flowers, including some stamped with the words “Polish Holocaust”, and then sang the national anthem.

Former Auschwitz prisoners walk through the death camp's gates ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations (AP)

Many nationalists still echo the propaganda of the Communist post-war era, which insisted Poland did nothing wrong during the Second World War and denied the reality that thousands of Poles had worked with the Nazis in their extermination campaign.

But when an opposition politician asked on Twitter what the current right-wing government of Poland would do to stamp out this growing anti-Semitic narrative, the interior minister said it was not their problem.

“React to what? To the fact that someone is not in their right mind and blames all the evil in this world and his frustrations on a particular nation?”

“If you are trying to blame this government for anti-Semitism in the heads of seriously crazy (I believe) fools, it is indecent and unwise,” he added.

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Last year, the Polish government sought to change the law so anyone claiming Poland was complicit in the Holocaust could be jailed, straining relations with Israel.

Of the 3.2m Polish Jews alive when the Second World War started, just 200,000 survived the Nazi atrocities. Many Jews from elsewhere in Europe were also sent to concentration camps on Polish soil where most were then murdered or worked to death.