Campaigners have called on the Polish authorities to halt construction work on a crematorium just minutes from the site of a Nazi concentration camp.

Majdanek, located on the outskirts of Lublin, was one of six key Nazi camps and around 80,000 people were murdered there during the Holocaust.

A Polish funeral company has applied to build a large commercial crematorium very near by – the second such application in recent years. The first proposal never went ahead but there are fears that this time it would. If so, it would stand only minutes away from the gas chambers of Madjanek.

In a letter to the mayor of Lublin, the Anti-Defamation League called on the council to block this and any future "outrageously insensitive" plans for crematoria near the camp.

"It is difficult to adequately express the pain and insult which will result if this project goes forward," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the organisation and himself a Holocaust survivor.

"The very idea that a company would consider locating a modern cremation facility adjacent to the sacred ground dedicated to the memory of those who suffered unspeakably, and to the more than hundreds of thousands of Jews and others killed within its gates, is reprehensible."