By Philip Pullella and Natalia Reiter
OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters) - Calling himself "a son of Germany," Pope Benedict prayed at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz on Sunday and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died in this "valley of darkness."
Ending a four-day pilgrimage to Poland, Benedict, 79, said humans could not fathom "this endless slaughter" but only seek reconciliation for those who suffered then and those who now "are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred."
As on the rest of his trip, he walked in the footsteps of his Polish-born predecessor John Paul, who came to the camp in 1979 on his first visit to Poland as pope. John Paul died in April 2005 and is revered as a saint in his native country.
"Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people," Benedict said in Italian at a monument near the ruins of a crematorium at Birkenau, the death camp section of the Auschwitz complex.
"I could not fail to come here," he said, gazing down the railway tracks that brought Jews in cattle cars to their death. "I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God."
The leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics also prayed for peace in his native German, which he has avoided to not hurt Polish and Jewish sensitivities. He was forced to join the Hitler Youth and drafted into the army during the war.
WHERE WAS GOD?
Before the ceremony, Benedict visited the main Auschwitz camp, where the Nazis executed or starved special prisoners.
He walked in under the camp's gateway with the motto "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you free) and proceeded to the Wall of Death firing line, where he met 32 of 200,000 survivors.
Many were Polish Catholics who kissed his papal ring. Benedict kissed a Jewish survivor, Henryk Mandelbaum, on both cheeks.
He also prayed in the cell where Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe died in 1941 after volunteering to replace a family man due to be killed. John Paul made Kolbe a saint in 1982.
Rain fell sporadically over Auschwitz until the main ceremony, when the skies cleared and a rainbow appeared.
Benedict said it was almost impossible, particularly for a German Pope, to speak at such a horrible place.
"The place where we are standing is a place of memory and at the same time, it is the place of the Shoah," he said.
"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God -- Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
"Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
Benedict, one of the Church's leading theologians, said humans could not "peer into God's mysterious plan" to understand such evil, but only "cry out humbly yet insistently to God -- 'rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!"
Alojzy Maciak, a Polish Auschwitz survivor, said Poles did not hold Benedict's nationality against him.
"We have forgiven the Germans a long time ago," he said at the Birkenau ceremony. "This is a visit by a Pope to Auschwitz, his nationality is not important."
Before he spoke, Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich chanted the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The New York-born rabbi was attacked on a Warsaw street on Saturday by a young man shouting "Poland is for Poles."
"This incident is very nasty but let's not let it undermine the great importance of today's event," he told Reuters.
Lodz Chief Rabbi Symcha Keller, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz, said the attack showed people still had to be taught the dangers of racial hatred. "That is why Pope Benedict's visit to this grave site is so important," he said.
Earlier on Sunday, Benedict said mass for more than 900,000 people in a field in Krakow where John Paul traditionally held huge gatherings with his countrymen before returning to Rome
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