Historic Visit to German Concentration Camp

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(Dresden) President Barack Obama is touring Buchenwald Concentration Camp this afternoon -  where 56,000 people died and which his great uncle helped liberate during World War II.

It is the President's first visit to such a camp and a stop he considers significant not just for personal reasons.

"[F]or me then to be able to come and reflect on this very difficult history and to not only reflect on the dangers of when peoples are in conflict and not acknowledging a common humanity, " he said this morning in Dresden, "but also to celebrate how out of that tragedy you now have a unified Europe, a Germany that is a very close ally of Israel, and the possibilities of reconciliation and forgiveness and hope."

Charlie Payne will not be accompanying his nephew at Buchenwald Friday. White House officials say it would have been difficult for Mr. Payne, Uncle Charlie Payne, who is in his eighties, to travel with the President to Dresden given the number of flights and stops along the way. And there are also indications Mr. Payne was not anxious to return to the place where he had witnessed so many horrors.

"The shock for this very young man -- he couldn't have been more than 19, 20, 21 at the time," said Mr. Obama of his uncle, "was such that he ended up, when he returned, having a very difficult time readjusting to civilian life, and it was a memory that burned in him for quite some time."

Chancellor Angela Merkel will accompany the President on his tour. The two leaders will visit the Living Memorial - a stainless steel plate that marks the ground plan of the first memorial to internees at Buchenwald. Day and night, summer and winter, the plate is heated to human body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Their tour around the camp will also bring them to what is known as "the Little Camp" - a sub camp of Buchenwald notorious for its brutality and harsh conditions. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who greeted Mr. Obama upon arrival at the camp Friday, is perhaps its most famous survivor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel reflected on how far her country and world has come since those atrocities of World War II with the reunification of Europe. "That is very moving, and it shows you that actually history makes things possible if a sufficient number of people believe in the dream of freedom."