US president visits Nazi concentration camp in Germany

After telling a U.S. television network that Ahmadinejad should visit Buchenwald himself, Obama accompanied two survivors of the Holocaust and Chancellor Angela Merkel on a tour of the camp, outside Weimar in eastern Germany.

Obama honored the 56,000 who died at the Nazi camp and the thousands who survived. He invoked, too, his great-uncle, Charlie Payne, 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 after witnessing 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 in the afternoon of April 11, 1945.

Obama walked through an open space where prisoner barracks had stood and past a crematorium with eight ovens before placing a white rose on the site where survivors erected a temporary monument for Buchenwald's liberation in April 1945.

"To this day we know there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened, a denial of a fact or truth that is baseless, ignorant and hateful," Obama said in a brief address.

"This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history," he added. "I will not forget what I have seen here today. These sights have not lost their horror over time."

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.