Israeli executives arrested over price-fixing of Auschwitz trips

Nine top executives at Israeli travel agents have been arrested on suspicion of inflating prices of student visits to Auschwitz and other former Nazi concentration camps in Poland, investigators said Tuesday. 

Police raided the corporate offices and homes of several suspects and froze some accounts, a statement said.

At least six travel agencies are accused of violating competition rules by colluding on prices before responding to an education ministry tender to take students to Holocaust memorials.

The alleged price fixing was aimed at maintaining the impression of competition while keeping prices high.

Seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, thousands of Israeli high school students make such trips each year. 

A trip can cost several thousand shekels per student, according to reports in the Israeli media. 

Once a year since 1988 thousands of young Israelis have joined politicians and former detainees at the "March of the Living" in Poland.

They gather around the international memorial in Birkenau and recite the kaddish - the Jewish prayer for the dead - as well as the names of the victims.

Around 1.1 million people are thought to have died at Auschwitz, 90 percent of them Jews.

The legacy of the death camp is still having contemporary repercussions.

On Monday, German authorities said that a 95-year-old former medic at Auschwitz will go on trial next month on at least 3,681 counts of accessory to murder.

Hubert Zafke was a medical orderly at the camp from August 15, 1944 to September 14, 1944. During this time, 14 trains carrying prisoners - including the teenage diarist Anne Frank - arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau where many would eventually be killed in the gas chambers.

Ahead of proceedings due to begin on 29 February, prosecutors said Zafke was "aware of the purpose of the Birkenau camp as an extermination camp" as well as of its structure.

"Given his awareness, the accused lent support to the organisation of the camp and was thereby both involved in and advanced the extermination," said prosecutors in an earlier statement as they charged Zafke for complicity in the "cruel and insidious killings of at least 3,681" people. 

The trial in the northeastern town of Neubrandenburg comes after an appeals court overturned an earlier ruling that the elderly accused was unfit to stand trial.