Netanyahu will be accompanied by a delegation of Israeli lawmakers and Holocaust survivors.
The visit was set to be particularly emotionally charged for the hardline premier, whose wife's father was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi Holocaust in which some six million Jews were murdered.
"This will be a very emotional visit. No Jew can go to such a venue without having the weight of history and memory on his shoulders," the premier's spokesman Mark Regev said.
The son of a prominent, nationalist historian, Netanyahu views the Jewish state as the "shield" against recent years' growing expressions of Holocaust denial and calls for the extermination of Jews, mainly by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"There is evil in the world. If it is unstopped it expands, and it is expanding. And it is threatening the same people, the Jewish people, but we know it only starts with the Jewish people," Netanyahu said on Monday.
"There is a new call for the extermination of the Jewish people," he said at the opening of an exhibition of the Auschwitz death camp blueprints at the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the Jewish state was doomed to be "wiped off the map" and has questioned the scale of the Holocaust. Israel considers Iran to be an "existential threat".
On the eve of Monday's trip, Netanyahu also warned against a new rise of anti-Semitism in the wake of Israel's devastating war in the Gaza Strip last year, when some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
"The fight against anti-Semitism is more important than ever because there has been a significant rise in the number of expressions of anti-Semitism since Operation Cast Lead," he said on Sunday.
"This anti-Semitism is mixed with a new attempt to deny the Jewish state the right of self-defence."
Israel on Sunday released a report saying that 2009 was a record year for acts of anti-Semitism across the world in decades.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu will also visit the former Warsaw ghetto and hold talks in the Polish capital with President Lech Kaczynski, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and other officials.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp outside the city of Krakow was liberated on January 27, 1945, by Soviet troops. The day was designated International Holocaust Memorial Day by the United Nations in 2005.
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