<div><p>Pope Benedict XVI's condemnation of a Holocaust row bishop "could not have been clearer," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Tuesday after criticism by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.</p><p>Merkel had earlier Tuesday called on the Vatican to "clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial" that the Nazis killed six million Jews.</p><p>"These clarifications have, in my opinion, not yet been sufficient," Merkel told a news conference, referring to a statement by the German pontiff last week.</p><p>But Lombardi recalled that "the pope's thoughts on the subject of the Holocaust were expressed with great clarity in the Cologne synagogue," in August 2005, and "in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on 28 May, 2006", and again on January 28.</p><p>The Vatican spokesman said last week Benedict expressed his "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews when he said: "The Shoah should be a warning for all against forgetting, denial and reductionism."</p><p>The row over the Holocaust started after the pope lifted the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a Holocaust denier who was among four breakaway traditionalist bishops whom Benedict brought back into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church on January 24.</p><p>That decision was widely condemned by Jewish leaders and organisations as well as some Catholics.</p><p>The Vatican said the pope was "troubled" by Williamson's interview in which he dismissed as "lies" the fact that some six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, most in gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps, claiming that only between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews died before and during World War II.</p><p>On Tuesday Lombardi stressed that the pope's condemnation last week "of statements that deny the Holocaust could not have been clearer and given the context this condemnation also concerned the positions of Monsignor Williamson and all similar positions," Lombardi said.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=41841187&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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