Historians are rethinking the way the Holocaust is being presented in museums as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps this month.

Shocking images of the mass killings of Jews were "used massively at the end of World War II to show the violence of the Nazis," historian Tal Bruttmann, a specialist on the Holocaust, told AFP.

But in doing so "we kind of lost sight of the fact that is not normal to show" such graphic scenes of mass murder, of people being humiliated and dehumanised, he said.

Up to this year, visitors to the Memorial de Caen war museum in northern France were plunged into darkened rooms with life-sized photographs showing the horror of what happened in the camps and the mass executions earlier in the war.

"The previous generation of Holocaust museums used these images because it reinforces the horror," said James Bulgin, who is in charge of the Holocaust galleries at London's Imperial War Museum.

The difficulty with that is that it "denies the people within the images any capacity for agency or respect or identity," he added.

"The other problem with Holocaust narratives is that they tend to relate the history of what the Nazis........

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