Controversy after German Soccer Team Visits Auschwitz Video from the German Football Federation of the national team's visit to Auschwitz A prominent leader in Germany's Jewish community has criticized a visit by members of the German national soccer team to the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp. Dieter Graumann, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, expressed dismay on Sunday that only three players from the national team made the trip, saying the whole squad should have taken part, Spiegel Online reported on Monday. The delegation, which included the team's coach and president along with the captain and two Polish-born players, paid its respects at the site on Friday. Other teams, including England, have also announced plans to visit the site ahead of the Euro 2012 championships, a premier European soccer event hosted jointly this year by Ukraine and Poland, where Auschwitz is located. In the 67 years since Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II, the German government and civil society have made great efforts to confront the travesty of Hitler's rule and memorialize those who perished. Yet, the issue remains a sensitive one. "If the whole national team had come, one could have reached hundreds of thousands of young people - more than a thousand memorial speeches" could reach, Spiegel Online quoted Mr. Graumann as saying. Mr. Graumann earlier took issue with remarks made by the team's director, Oliver Bierhoff, who suggested he might use the opportunity of visiting the camp site, where over a million Jews and others were killed, to hold a "fireside chat" about Germany's Nazi history. As Spiegel points out, Mr. Bierhoff used the word "Kamingespräch" in German, which contains a word that can mean chimney. Mr. Graumann said the word choice displayed "colossal insensitivity and tastelessness" because it evoked the ovens the Nazis used to burn bodies at the camp. "People in Auschwitz, my grandparents for example, were gassed, incinerated and sent up the chimney," Mr. Graumann said. In video of the delegation's visit published on the national team's Web site, players and soccer officials toured the former concentration camp in a falling rain, placing candles and a wreath at memorial sites. "It is our duty to pay very close attention and above all to keep conveying to young players in our clubs that there must be no room for anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance," Wolfgang Niersbach, president of the German Football Federation said, according to a Spiegel translation.