Pence to visit Auschwitz memorial during trip to Poland

Vice President Pence on Friday will visit the memorial at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during his trip to Poland.

The Washington Post reported that Pence will tour the memorial with Polish President Andrez Duda. It will be Pence’s first visit to the site of the Nazi-run camp where more than 1 million people were killed during World War II.

Pence will additionally meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the two will tour a memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which commemorates the 1943 event where Jewish residents resisted Nazi efforts to round up and deport those who lived there.

{mosads}Pence is visiting Europe this week for a pair of conferences. The vice president will be in Warsaw for the Ministerial to Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East, which is being jointly hosted by the U.S. and Poland.

The vice president this week is expected to highlight the administration’s concerns about Iran, and the Post reports that Pence will hold defense meetings while in Poland amid discussions of a potential U.S. military base in the country.

He will then travel to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, which is being held Friday through Sunday.

Pence and other Trump administration officials have positioned themselves as staunch supporters of Israel. The president regularly touts his decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Pence spoke out on Tuesday against tweets from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) that were criticized as anti-Semitic when she suggested that U.S. support for the Jewish state is the result of money flowing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

Omar apologized on Monday after she faced swift criticism from a number of Democrats and Republicans.

Critics of the Republican backlash to Omar have noted that party leaders were slow to take action against Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who met last year with members of Austria’s Freedom Party, a group founded by a former Nazi SS officer and whose leader was involved in neo-Nazi circles.

President Trump has also faced criticism for saying “both sides” were to blame for the violence that erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, leaving one counter-protester dead.