German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the former Auschwitz Nazi death camp on Friday for the first time as chancellor and said admitting Nazi crimes was a key part in Germany's identity that could help combat growing antisemitism.

"Remembering the crimes ... is a responsibility which never ends," Merkel said during the visit in a message targeting calls from the German far right for a shift away from a culture of remembrance and atonement.

"To be aware of this responsibility is part of our national identity, our self-understanding as an enlightened and free society," she added.

Merkel is only the third chancellor ever to visit a place that has come to symbolize the Holocaust. She expressed Germany's deep shame at what happened in Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau, where a million Jews lost their lives between 1940 and 1945.

"I bow my head before the victims of the Shoah," she said, speaking in front of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and a survivor of the camp, 87-year-old Bogdan Stanislaw Bartnikowski.

The 65-year-old chancellor, who was born nine years after the end of World War II, also addressed a rise of anti-Semitic and other hate crimes in Germany in recent years, saying they had reached an alarming level. 

To combat anti-Semitism, the history of extermination camps has to be shared, it has to be told, she said.

During her tenure as chancellor, Merkel has paid her respects at other Nazi concentration camps, and has visited Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial Yad Vashem five times.

Poland's Foreign Ministry called her visit historic, and noted that the visit was the third of an incumbent head of a German government.

On the eve of her trip, Germany's federal state approved a new 60-million-euro (66 million U.S. dollars) donation for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, marking 10 years since it was set up.

Police figures show that anti-Semitic offences rose by almost 10 percent in Germany last year from the previous year to 1,646 – the highest level in a decade.

(With input from AFP)