BERLIN -- A fire severely damaged a concentration camp museum Saturday in the eastern town of Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and a state official said arson was suspected in the blaze at the camp where some 100,000 people were killed by the Nazis during World War II.
'Arson was probably the cause of the fire,' said Alwin Ziel, interior minister of the east German state of Brandenburg.
'I am deeply shocked.'
Half of the Sachsenshausen museum, housed in a former camp barracks for Jewish prisoners, was destroyed in the blaze which broke out early Saturday, police said.
Police searched the grounds of the former concentration camp and made random checks of people in Oranienburg.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin visited the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp and museum 10 days ago. In a speech at Sachsenhausen, Rabin called on Germans to fight right-wing extremists and racism.
Historians estimate about 100,000 people were killed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during the Holocaust.
In another development last week, authorities announced the discovery of mass graves at Sachsenhausen containing the remains of 12,500 people who died or were killed at the camp between 1945 and 1950, when it was used by the former Soviet Union as a prison for Germans accused of working for the Nazis.
Meanwhile, police in Berlin said Friday they had arrested three people in connection with a bombing last month that damaged a monument to Jewish suffering under the Nazis.
Attacks on foreigners and hostels for political asylum-seekers in Germany have greatly increased during 1992.
The head of Brandenburg's domestic intelligence bureau, Heinz Pfaff, said Thursday that right-wing extremists posed a direct threat to the development of democracy in the eastern German state.
Ten people have been killed in right-wing extremist attacks in Germany during 1992, German's federal domestic intelligence service said.
