June 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/world/europe/06prexy.html?hp
By NICHOLAS KULISH, JEFF ZELENY AND ALAN COWELL
WEIMAR, Germany —President Obama traveled to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald Friday, laid a single white rose at a memorial to the dead and, returning emotionally to a theme he addressed in a major speech in Cairo on Thursday, criticized those who denied the Holocaust.
“To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful,” the President said, echoing his words in Cairo in an address that reached for what he called a “new beginning” in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world.
By visiting Buchenwald on Friday, he also underscored what he termed in Cairo America’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel. Mr. Obama has been pushing hard during this trip for a two-state solution in the Middle East, and the administration has angered some in Israel by taking a tough stand against Israel’s expanding existing settlements.
In his visit to the former concentration camp, Mr. Obama said the site was the “ultimate rebuke” to those who deny or seek to minimize the Holocaust.
“These sights have not lost their horror with the passage of time.”
“More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I have seen here today.”
The camp where 56,000 people died also bears a particular significance for Germans, embodying the contradiction of a civilized society’s descent into organized barbarism. The camp sits just a few miles outside the city of Weimar, one of the country’s leading cultural centers and home to the great German writers Goethe and Schiller.
With his hands behind his back and a thoughtful expression on his face, Mr. Obama walked through the former concentration camp, flanked by Chancellor Angela Merkel and Elie Wiesel, a Nobel peace prize winner, writer and Holocaust survivor, who survived a death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and was at the camp when it was liberated in April 1945.
Mr. Wiesel spoke movingly about the death of his father a few months before the liberation of the camp, calling the visit “a way of coming and visit my father’s grave. But he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky, which has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.”
Mr. Obama claims a personal connection to the concentration camp. His great-uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate a sub-camp of Buchenwald called Ohrdruf.
Mrs. Merkel, who like Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama laid a long-stemmed white rose in memory of the dead, spoke of the German responsibility “to do everything possible that something like that never happens again.”
She added, “I bow before all the victims.”
Earlier the two leaders met for talks in Dresden, where President Obama declared that “the moment is now” to press for a Middle East settlement. He put Israelis and Palestinians on notice that it was up to them to make “difficult compromises.”
President Obama said he was dispatching his top Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, to the region next week to follow up on issues raised during the Cairo speech. Time was of the essence, he said, for Israelis and the Palestinians to step up their efforts.
“The moment is now for us to act on what we all know to be the truth, which is that each side is going to have to make some difficult compromises,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to reject violence. The Palestinians have to get serious about creating a security environment that is required for Israel to feel confident. Israelis are going to have to take some difficult steps.”
“Ultimately, the United States can’t force peace upon the parties,” he added, “but what we’ve tried to do is to clear away some of the misunderstandings so we can at least begin to have frank dialogue.”
On other issues, the two leaders said they would work closely on trying to persuade Iran to abandon what the West fears is a nuclear program to build an atomic bomb but which Tehran says is for civilian purposes.
But there was no indication of major progress on Washington’s desire for Europeans to accept prisoners from Guantánamo Bay as Mr. Obama moves to redeem a pledge to close the detention center in Cuba.
“I don’t anticipate it’s going to be resolved in the next two or three months,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Obama’s one-day visit to Germany is laden with symbolism. Dresden, in the former East Germany, is for many Germans, a symbol of the suffering of civilians. Germans perished in large numbers when the British and American air forces fire-bombed the city in February 1945, only months before the end of World War II. Military experts still debate whether the onslaught was necessary with the German Army already in retreat.
The bombing destroyed the baroque Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady, which the president visited Friday. The church was not rebuilt until after the fall of Communism. Some $218 million, more than half of it private donations, was spent on reconstructing it, and the new church was consecrated in 2005.
Mrs. Merkel suggested Friday that the city symbolized the progress Germany has made since the collapse of the former East Germany.
The meeting between her and Mr. Obama renewed speculation about how friendly they really were beyond the diplomatic smiles and handshakes.
But Mr. Obama dismissed the suggestion that his relationship with Chancellor Merkel was strained. Asked by a German television reporter about it, he playfully admonished the press.
“Stop it, all of you,” Mr. Obama said. “We have more than enough problems out there without manufacturing problems.”
He smiled and looked over to his German counterpart, saying: “It is a great pleasure to be with my friend once again, who I always seek out for intelligent analysis and straight talk.”
Indeed, Mr. Obama said on Friday: “Germany is a close friend and a critical partner to the United States, and I believe that friendship is going to be essential not only for our two countries but for the world if we are to make progress on some of the critical issues that we face, whether it’s national security issues or economic issues or issues that affect the globe like climate change.”
Specifically, he alluded to the global financial crisis, which created major differences between the United States and Germany. Mr. Obama said it was “going to be very important to coordinate between Europe and the United States as we move to strengthen our financial regulatory systems.”
“We affirmed that we are not going to engage in protectionism. And, as all of us do, we have to make sure we keep our borders open and that companies can move back and forth between the United States and Europe in providing goods and services to our respective countries.”
Nicholas Kulish reported from Weimar, Germany; Jeff Zeleny Dresden ; and Alan Cowell from Paris.
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