Auschwitz is disintegrating. Over 60 years of winter snow, summer drought and millions of visitors have taken a heavy toll on the former Nazi death camp.

Just as survivors visiting the camp dwindle each year, so time is bearing down on the prison buildings, the rusting barbed-wire fencing and remnants of the gas chambers left behind when the Germans fled in January 1945.

Evidence of the victims - hair, spectacles, children's toys and other belongings - is also falling to pieces, eaten away by insects and mildew, its disappearance giving slow support to those who try to deny the Holocaust ever happened.

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Unless conservation is stepped up there may soon be little left of the biggest graveyard in Europe, where up to 1.5 million men, women and children, mostly Jews, were slaughtered.

Now new management at the camp, covering 470 acres (190 hectares) on two sites near Oswiecim in southern Poland, is accelerating work and hiring more staff to slow the deterioration and save the site as a lesson for future generations.

"If there is one place in the world that should be kept as a reminder of the consequences of racism and intolerance, it is this one," said Piotr Cywinski, who took over as director of Auschwitz in September. "But it gets more difficult every year."

One of the many problems facing Cywinski and his 260 staff at the site, now a museum, is that Auschwitz was not built to last. The concentration camp known as Auschwitz was actually two camps, and both are suffering serious problems.

'Not stones - bones'
Auschwitz I, a stone and brick-built Polish military base used by the Nazis to house Polish political prisoners, was hastily enlarged with forced labour using the cheapest possible materials after Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

Auschwitz II Birkenau, 3 km away, was a specially built killing factory thrown up in 1943 for the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other minorities.

Linked directly to Europe's railway network by a special siding to speed up the murders, the Nazis used it to expedite their plans for a "Final Solution" to "the Jewish problem."

Parts of the Birkenau site are built from the remains of demolished Polish villages and stable blocks and these have survived. But many other buildings have already disappeared.

Most wooden huts were removed after the war for use as temporary shelters. And the strongest of the buildings, the concrete gas chambers and crematoriums, were blown up by the guards before their retreat. These ruins have collapsed, undermined by rising ground water, flooding and erosion.

The area around the gas chambers is cordoned off with tape but still accessible to the public, some of whom clamber over the rubble. Some visitors even remove relics and artefacts.

The ash pits where the remains of many victims were dumped lie open to the elements and the ground trampled by visitors around them is studded with what look like tiny white stones.

"Not stones - bones," explains Jarek Mensfelt, a linguist and senior guide at the museum. "Tiny fragments of human bones. It is terrible that tourists can tread on human remains."

Cywinski is acutely aware of the deficiencies of the museum but is constrained by money and the physical limitations imposed by the scale of the site.

Hair and shoes
Various grandiose ideas - including one for a giant dome - have been rejected on grounds of cost and because any major construction would destroy some of the area and alter it.

Smaller-scale enclosures to protect the buildings would be possible, but even these would be expensive and would have to be agreed by all the groups that protect the site.

"Tens of millions of dollars, more, would be needed to do all the work," said Cywinski. But money is not the main problem: the Polish government has provided large sums and there are a number of international donors.

Time itself is the enemy, eroding the site and its contents.

"Conservationists are like doctors: we can extend life, but not for eternity," said Cywinski, who opposes any suggestion that decaying original artefacts should be replaced by copies.

Faded and frail, two tonnes of hair shorn from victims is piled up in one cell block: once blonde plaits, black pony-tails and auburn curls, it is gradually decaying and now looks like grey wire wool.

Cry of despair
The museum has had more luck with its 80,000 shoes, mostly odd. Chief conservationist Rafal Pioro and his staff of 38 invited school children to help clean and polish some of them.

But there are so many, most still have to be stored in a warehouse without air-conditioning. Slowly, most are falling apart.

"The work is endless and painstaking and can be heart-rending," said Pioro. "When we were working on the children's shoes, some of us were crying all the time."

Workers at Auschwitz are struggling to slow the ageing of the camp and keep it as a lesson on the evils of anti-Semitism.

They aim, in the words of a plaque near the gas chambers, to keep Auschwitz as "a cry of despair and a warning to humanity".

Israel Gutman, a former Auschwitz prisoner and adviser to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs'and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, is determined the camp will be conserved as long as possible, whatever the cost.

"There are still people who claim the Holocaust never took place," he said. "Auschwitz must be preserved for as long as possible because it gives those people a chance to go there, to see the real gas chambers."