Police say they will not be taking action against Nazi impersonators who flaunt swastika flags or dress as Nazi war criminals at a WW2 re-enactment event in Bury next bank holiday weekend.

Danish film director Lars Von Trier has apologised for a string of comments in which he claimed to sympathise with Adolf Hitler and joked about the Final Solution.

Mr Von Trier said he was sincerely sorry if his remarks, made at the Cannes press conference for his new film Melancholia, had hurt anyone.

A man who could be one of the last people tried in Germany for Nazi-era war crimes has been found guilty of helping to kill Jews at Sobibor concentration camp.

John Demjanjuk was accused of being an accessory to the deaths of more than 27,000 people while he was a concentration camp guard during the Holocaust.

A judge sentenced him to five years in prison.

For Nazi hunter Ephraim Zuroff, it is the end of a long court battle - but for Sandor Kepiro, Mr Zuroff's accuser in the libel stand-off that ended this week, the beginning of another.

On Tuesday, a Budapest court acquitted Mr Zuroff, director of the Simon Weisenthal Centre in Israel, of libel for describing Sandor Kepiro, a former officer in the Hungarian Gendarmerie, as a war criminal.

The number of violence-prone neo-Nazis in Germany rose by more than 10 per cent in 2010 to 5,600, according to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

When Bergen Belsen, the concentration in which Anne Frank and around 50,000 others perished, was liberated by British troops, they found a place of disease, starvation and death.

The soldiers who first entered the camps later recalled witnessing piles of naked bodies left to rot all around. There were 60,000 people still inside, most barely clinging on to life.

The Nazi officer who seized Anne Frank from her hiding place in an Amsterdam attic and deported her to a concentration camp later served in the West German intelligence agency BND, according to a new book.

The 50th anniversary of the trial of one of the Nazi regime's most notorious figures is being marked with ceremonies around the world.

The eight-month-long trial of Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of the Nazis' Final Solution to eliminate the Jewish population, opened on April 11 1961. The trial was conducted with Eichmann sitting behind bullet-proof glass and in the glare of the worldwide media.

"If it's requested, it's made. I don't want to be pulled into this because I'm a confectioner and there's nothing more to it.

"If someone ordered it, I'd create a Gaddafi cake."