December 21, 2009 -- Updated 1302 GMT (2102 HKT)
(CNN) -- Police in Poland have recovered the
infamous sign stolen from the front gate of the Auschwitz
concentration camp and arrested five men, they announced
Monday.
The "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, which means "Work Sets You Free"
in German and is synonymous with the Nazi camps of World War II,
was stolen late last week from Auschwitz in Poland, police said
Friday.
The theft prompted outrage around the world.
Five men in their 20s and 30s have been arrested, journalist
Tomas Machala of CNN affiliate Polsat in the Polish capital Warsaw
said Monday.
They were not neo-Nazis, he said, in response to speculation at
the time of the theft that the far right was responsible.
"They have some criminal background," he said, noting they had
been arrested for robbery and brawling in the past. He did not give
their names.
"They wanted to sell the sign and earn some money," he said.
Police said it was too early to say if they acted on their own or
were hired to commit the robbery. They face up to 10 years in
prison if they are convicted, Machala said.
It is not clear how they managed to steal the sign, which was
cut into three pieces into order to fit it into a car, he said.
They were arrested hundreds of miles north of the concentration
camp memorial, near the city of Gdansk. The sign had been hidden in
a forest, Machala said.
Police were "alerted at 5 a.m. local time on Friday by museum
guards" that the sign, was stolen, according to police spokeswoman
Agnieszka Szczygiel.
The heavy iron sign "was removed by being unscrewed on one side
and pulled off on the other," Szczygiel said.
The police investigation is ongoing.
The chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, called
the theft shocking.
"The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory
of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would
like to return us to darker days," Avner Shalev said Friday.
"I call on all enlightened forces in the world -- who fight
against anti-semitism, racism, xenophobia and the hatred of the
other -- to join together to combat these trends," he said.
More than 1 million people died in gas chambers or were starved
to death in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex;
about 90 percent of the victims were Jews.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles-based
Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the sign "the defining symbol of
the Holocaust.
"Everyone knew that this was not a place where work makes you
free, but it was the place where millions of men, women, and
children were brought for one purpose only -- to be murdered," Hier
said. "The audacity and boldness of this crime deserves the full
attention of the Polish government."
The center calls itself one of the largest
international Jewish human rights organizations.
