Survivors and international leaders honoured the victims of the Holocaust on Monday (January 27), with memorial events and services held all over the world.

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day coincided with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland.

Speaking at the DOSB’s New Year’s reception in Frankfurt, Hörmann announced a more active analysis of the "historical guilt" of German sport under Nazism.

He also apologised for the role of sport during and after the Nazi regime.

"We have been silent on this important topic for far too long," Hörmann said.

"We have dealt with this shameful part of our history far too little."

Set up in 1940, Auschwitz was initially intended to house Polish political prisoners.

But it eventually became the biggest of the Nazis' extermination camps, where Adolf Hitler's plan to kill all Jewish people - the "Final Solution" - was put in to practice.

At least 1.1 million people were murdered there, most of whom were Jews.

Among those who died was Estella Agsteribbe, a Dutch gymnast who won an Olympic gold medal at Amsterdam 1928. 

She was murdered together with her husband Samuel Blits, their six-year-old daughter Nanny and their two-year-old son Alfred.

The camp was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.

"We are not going to draw a line under it, but to fulfill our responsibility and deal intensively with the past," Hörmann was reported as saying by Deutsche Presse-Agentur. 

The 59-year-old appealed to affiliates to do the same.

"We owe it to all athletes who have lived through this time and who have partially paid with their lives," he added.