Whether Bilderberg will call for still higher prices is unclear, but Henry Kissinger and others had gleefully anticipated ultimate prices at $150 a barrel a year ago. Bilderberg is certainly concerned about supply, which is related to the "Latin American problem," as one insider said.

Approximately 120 international leaders in politics and finance will also discuss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has caused a rare breach between American Bilderbergers and their European counterparts since the United States Iraq invasion in 2003. Whether the United States should invade Iran is also high on the agenda.

Bilderberg is especially concerned about Venezuela, where as part of a plan to increase revenues from its petroleum industry President Hugo Chavez said May 7 he would impose a new tax on companies that extract oil from his country. Big Oil is represented at Bilderberg by Jeroen van der Veer of The Netherlands, chairman of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Franco Bernabe of Italy, vice chairman of Rothschild Europe, among others. "We are going to create a new oil tax, called the tax on extraction," Chavez said. "The companies that are pumping oil in Venezuela are making a lot of money."

Chavez accused foreign oil companies of exploiting his country's vast petroleum reserves without paying sufficient taxes. Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter but has troubled oil barons by sending cheap petroleum to needy American families and subsidizing domestic use so local citizens pay 12 cents a gallon.

Venezuela has voided oil-pumping contracts with private companies at 32 fields and replaced them with a mixed-company model that gave Venezuela's state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela SA a minimum 60 percent stake. Chavez has also sharply raised royalties and taxes, and reduced potential drilling acreage by almost two-thirds. He is also resisting expansion of NAFTA throughout the hemisphere, a prime Bilderberg goal.

Chavez's outspoken criticisms of the United States make it unlikely that American Bilderbergers can help smooth over the supply problem. However, banker David Rockefeller's family has always had a heavy interest in oil and other investments in South America.

President Bush will have a top White House aide representing him at Bilderberg, and high officials of the state, defense and treasury departments will attend. Heads of state and other high officials in government and banking will attend from Europe and Canada.

Bilderberg's agenda also includes the turmoil in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, with an emphasis on Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, and global warming.

The Bilderberg group takes it name from the hotel in Holland where the group met in 1954, during the earliest period of its inception. Bilderbergers meet regularly, presumably on a once-a-year basis, at various locations around the world, always in extreme secrecy, often at resorts controlled by either the Rockefeller or Rothschild families. The Rothschild family is the leading European force within the Bilderberg Group, sharing its power with the American-based Rockefeller empire.

Bilderberg maintains an extremely low profile and seldom, if ever, publishes reports or studies for the public, at least, under its own official aegis. Participants denied the groups very existence for decades until it was forced into the open by the glare of media publicity, generated largely by the now defunct Spotlight newspaper.

"We cannot say today it's dead because 15 democracies are not considering it dead," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said of the states which have ratified the charter despite French and Dutch "No" votes in referendums last year.

Moeller said the EU would have to wait until France and the Netherlands had their national elections, around May next year.

But all 25 EU nations have to ratify the charter for it to come into force and a poll in the Netherlands on Saturday showed that if a fresh referendum were held now, more voters would oppose the constitution than did in last year's ballot.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot told reporters at talks at a monastery outside Vienna: "We will not change our minds, that's for sure."

Germany, which takes over the EU presidency in January, said the results of those two votes had to be respected but signaled it would be ready to find a solution by the end of June 2007 if other EU states wanted it to.

"For Germany -- and no doubt all those who have ratified the text -- it is essential to hold on to the political substance of the constitutional treaty," he told counterparts according to comments made available to the media.

German officials are looking for a winner to emerge from French elections with a strong enough mandate to take decisions on the way ahead for the charter by a June 2007 EU summit.

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said that would potentially allow the charter to be finally adopted two years later, but Britain argues the EU would do better to focus its priorities elsewhere.

MOOD OF CRISIS

The deadlock has created a mood of crisis in Brussels. A recent poll showed barely half of Europeans see EU membership positively and many were concerned about the bloc's policy of inviting poorer states from the east to join.

Foreign ministers were to study how to win back popularity for the EU by increasing cooperation in specific areas, such as boosting cross-border cooperation in crimefighting.

Other proposals include ideas to pool European consular resources available to travelers caught up in natural disasters, such as the 2004 southeast Asian tsunami, which hit thousands of European tourists.

Analysts say the EU enlargement has been the chief victim of the constitution deadlock, which some politicians have blamed for fuelling eurosceptic feelings in the EU and being a main factor why French voters rejected the charter.

The EU has taken a tougher tone toward would-be members. Last week it delayed until October a decision on whether Romania and Bulgaria can join the bloc in 2007, urging them to do more on administrative reforms and tackling organized crime.

For future aspirants from Turkey to the Balkans, it says that even if they fulfil membership criteria, the EU itself may not be economically and politically ready to take them in.

"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible - and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said later.

"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"

Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II visited the camp as a Pole in 10979, he came as "a son of the German people."

"The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the Earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.

"By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."

Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish town of Oswiecim - Auschwitz in German. Others who died there included Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma - or Gypsies, and political opponents of the Nazis.

Benedict did not refer to collective guilt of the German people but instead focused on the Nazi regime. He said he was "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness."

He also did not mention the controversy over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, who some say did not do all in his power to prevent Jews from being deported to concentration camps. The Vatican rejects that accusation.

Typically, Benedict did not mention his own personal experiences during the war. Raised by his anti-Nazi father, Benedict was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager against his will and then was drafted into the German army in the last months of the war.

He wrote in his memoirs that he decided to desert in the war's last days in 1945 and returned to his home in Traunstein in Bavaria, risking summary execution if caught. In the book, he recounted his terror at being briefly stopped by two soldiers.

He was then held for several weeks as a prisoner of war by U.S. forces who occupied his hometown.

Earlier, the white-clad Benedict walked alone under the camp gate containing the notorious words: "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Sets You Free."

He stopped for a full minute before the Wall of Death, where the Nazis killed thousands of prisoners. He was handed a lighted candle, which he placed before the wall.

At the Wall of Death, a line of 32 elderly camp survivors awaited Benedict, most of them Catholic. He moved slowly down the line, stopping to talk with each, taking one woman's face in his hands and kissing one of the men on both cheeks.

Benedict then visited the dark cell in the basement of one of the buildings, the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar, was executed after voluntarily taking the place of a condemned prisoner with a large family in 1941. Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II in 1982.

Benedict stopped to pray again in the cell, standing before a candle placed there by John Paul during his 1979 visit.

The visit is heavy with significance for Roman Catholic-Jewish relations, a favorite theme for Benedict and John Paul.

This was the third time Benedict has visited Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau. The first was in 1979, when he accompanied John Paul, and in 1980, when he came with a group of German bishops while he was archbishop of Munich.

Benedict's stop at Auschwitz - his last before he left for Rome - was a somber close to a four-day trip that was otherwise upbeat, with some 900,000 people turning out for his Sunday mass in a meadow in Krakow, the city where John Paul II once served as archbishop.

Earlier, he urged 900,000 singing, clapping Poles gathered in a rain-soaked field to share their faith with other countries, saying it was the best way to honor their beloved John Paul.

The enormous, exuberant crowd chanted "Benedetto! Benedetto!" and sang "Sto Lat," or "A Hundred Years," wishing him a long life.

"I ask you, finally, to share with the other peoples of Europe and the world the treasure of your faith, not least as a way of honoring the memory of your countryman, who, as the successor of St. Peter, did this with extraordinary power and effectiveness," Benedict said as he concluded his homily during the Mass in the Blonia meadow.

"I ask you to stand firm in your faith! Stand firm in your hope! Stand firm in your love! Amen!" he concluded, speaking in Polish on the last day of his trip.

Predominantly Roman Catholic Poland joined the
European Union only two years ago, 15 years after the collapse of communist rule.

"He told us that we should remain ourselves, that we should stay as we were before, attached to our traditions and Christian values," said Jacek Radon, 37, a Krakow businessman. "We should carry into the European Union our attachment to faith and to Christ."

A shadow was cast over the papal visit by Saturday's attack on Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who was to say Kaddish, or the Jewish prayer for the dead, during the ceremony led by the pope.

Schudrich told The Associated Press he was attacked in central Warsaw after confronting a man who shouted at him, "Poland for Poles!" The rabbi said the unidentified man punched him in the chest and sprayed him with what appeared to be pepper spray. He was not injured.

Police said they were treating the incident as a possible anti-Semitic attack.

Schudrich, said the most important part of Benedict's message "was his physical presence at Auschwitz" but that some Jews wished he had gone further by directly addressing anti-Semitism.

"It was a very powerful statement and the words that we heard were powerful, but I'm sure some felt a glaring omission ... on the question of anti-Semitism. Jews are very sensitive to that and we are used to hearing the words of John Paul II."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles, California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Associated Press that Benedict's presence at the camp and his remarks were firm reminders that Holocaust deniers were not speaking the truth.

"He wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth. For him to now go there as the pope and acknowledge the horrors the Holocaust visited on the Jewish people and all mankind is important," he said.

Benedict, 79, has reached out to Poles by delivering parts of his speeches and homilies in Polish and by retracing beloved native son John Paul II's steps. He visited John Paul's birthplace, Wadowice, and Sunday's Mass was held on the same spot where John Paul also drew large crowds on his return trips to Krakow.

Benedict has been applauded during his visit to Poland for encouraging prayers for John Paul's canonization as a saint and for saying he hopes it will happen "in the near future."