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Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, called the theft an attack on the memory of the Holocaust and the leaders of Poland and Israel condemned the incident during talks on the sidelines of a global climate summit in Copenhagen.

Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished in the Nazi death camp located in southern Poland during World War Two. Prisoners arriving at the camp used to enter via a relatively small iron gate topped by the German-language motto. More than 200 hectares (500 acres) of the former death camp became a museum after the war ended.

"Early this morning the guards patrolling the site noticed the sign was not in its place," Jaroslaw Mensfelt, the museum''s spokesman, told Reuters. "We immediately notified the police." Mensfelt said numerous cameras were installed at the site and local police were analysing the film. He said no further details regarding the theft were available.

"We have already installed a replica sign over the gate. It has been used in the past when the original was being repaired. I hope the original will quickly be retrieved and the thieves caught" Mensfelt said.

The wording of the sign became a symbol of the Nazis'' efforts to deceive their victims into a false sense of security before murdering them. Some Jews and other groups arriving at the camp would have thought they were coming to do forced labour, not to be killed as part of a deliberate systematic policy of genocide.

"I was shocked to learn this morning of the theft of the sign, which has come to symbolise the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust," a statement by Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, said. "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."

In January, Poland marks the 65th anniversary of the camp''s liberation by the Red Army. It plans to open a new exhibition in the former prisoners'' barracks chronicling the liberation.