Obama visits Buchenwald

WEIMAR, Germany -- President Barack Obama absorbed the stark horrors memorialized at the Buchenwald concentration camp yesterday 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.

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."

Obama's great-uncle, Charlie Payne, was among troops of the 89th Infantry Division who liberated a nearby subcamp, Ohrdruf.

"He returned from his service in a state of shock," Obama said, "saying little and isolating himself for months on end from family and friends." Payne bore "painful memories that would not leave his head."

Obama privately met several Buchenwald survivors on the eve of the 65th anniversary of the Allied landing at Normandy, France. 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.

The victims at Buchenwald included some 11,000 Jews but also communists, Gypsies and other minorities from across central Europe.

One by one, the president, Merkel, Wiesel and Buchenwald survivor Bertrand Herz placed pale yellow roses on a metal plaque known as the Living Memorial, kept permanently at body temperature as a monument to the victims.

Later, Obama told reporters that he would seek "confidence-building measures" from the Israelis and Palestinians when his special envoy George Mitchell visits the Middle East next week, hoping to build on the firm call for a new peace process he made Thursday in Cairo.

Obama said he would like to see Palestinians improve security conditions, end corruption and move against anti-Israeli incitement, while Israel should halt settlement construction, improve the flow of reconstruction aid to the Gaza Strip and allow greater Palestinian movement in the occupied West Bank.

After the tour, Obama visited troops being treated at the Landstuhl U.S. military hospital for wounds from 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.