Obama invokes lesson of Buchenwald deaths

WEIMAR, Germany – President Barack Obama absorbed the horrors memorialized at the Buchenwald concentration camp Friday and said the lesson for the modern world is vigilance against evil, subjugation of the weak and 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 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.

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 J. Mitchell back to the Middle East next week. The president’s outreach to Islam in his Cairo speech a day earlier was well received in the Muslim world and he is hoping that will make progress more possible in the intractable dispute at the core of Muslim and Arab anger toward the U.S. and the West.

For Obama, the visit on a chilly, overcast day was a touchstone of his ancestry. Obama’s great uncle, Charlie Payne, was among troops of the 89th Infantry Division who liberated a nearby subcamp, Ohrdruf, the same month. “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.”

The president said Buchenwald “teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”

He added: “It’s also important for us, I think, to remember that the perpetrators of such evil were human, as well, and that we have to guard against cruelty in ourselves.”