WEIMAR, Germany — President Barack Obama absorbed the stark horrors memorialized at the Buchenwald concentration camp Friday and said the lesson for the modern world is vigilance against evil, against subjugation of the weak and against the “cruelty in ourselves.”
Obama honored the 56,000 who died at the Nazi camp and the thousands who survived. He invoked, too, his great-uncle, who helped liberate a Buchenwald satellite prison in 1945 and came back a haunted man.
“More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished,” Obama said.
He saw the crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences, guard towers and the clock set at 3:15, marking the moment of the camp’s liberation by the U.S. Army the afternoon of April 11, 1945.
He challenged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has expressed doubts that 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, to visit too.
“To this day, there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened,” Obama said. “This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”
The president said he saw — reflected in the Nazi brutality against Jews and the other impounded outcasts — Israel’s capacity to empathize with the suffering of others. He said that gave him more hope Israel and the Palestinians can achieve an equitable and lasting peace.
Toward that elusive goal, Obama is sending special envoy George Mitchell back to the Middle East next week.
Obama, the first U.S. president to tour Buchenwald, privately met several Buchenwald survivors. He toured the remains of the hillside compound with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who was once a starving teenager in the camp.
Obama, in a dark suit and red tie, wore a torn red ribbon as a sign of mourning.
After the tour, the president visited troops being treated at the Landstuhl U.S. military hospital for wounds suffered in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He then flew to Paris to reunite with his family, meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy today and commemorate the D-Day anniversary.
