(View of the barbed wire at the former Birkenau Nazi death camp. A Muslim cultural institute in Germany criticised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for disparaging the Holocaust, daring him to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo: AFP)

A Muslim cultural institute in Germany criticised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for disparaging the Holocaust, daring him to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp.

"In this place of horror he can again deny the Holocaust, if he has the courage," a spokesman for the Islam-Archiv-Deutschland Central Institute told the German Catholic press agency KNA.

In recent statements, the Iranian president has dismissed the Nazis' systematic slaughter of mainland Europe's Jews as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel and called for the state to be "wiped off the map".

By denying the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad not only denigrated the Jewish victims of the genocide but also the 200,000 Roms and Arabs murdered in the "gypsy camp" of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps, the institute spokesman said.

The fact that the president of an Islamic state repeated Nazi anti-Semitism was harmful to the image of Islam and "a disgrace for all the world's Muslims", he added.

The institute, founded in 1927, is the oldest Muslim body in Germany. It has been dedicated to preserving the community's archives since the 18th century and fostering relations between Muslims and other religions.

A controversial contest for cartoons of the Holocaust was launched in Iran on Monday in a tit-for-tat move over European newspaper publications of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that have angered Muslims worldwide.

The first entry was said to be from renowned Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig, according to the website organising the competition with Iran's biggest-selling newspaper Hamshahri.

(Source: AFP)