US President Barack Obama witnessed the Nazi ovens of the Buchenwald concentration camp on Friday, its clock tower frozen at the time of liberation, and said the leaders of today must not rest against the spread of evil.
The president called the camp where an estimated 56,000 people died the "ultimate rebuke" to Holocaust deniers and sceptics. And he bluntly challenged one of them, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, to visit Buchenwald.
"These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time," Obama said after seeing crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences, guard towers and the clock set at 3:15, marking the camp's liberation in the afternoon of April 11, 1945. "More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished."
Text: AP
Image: This April 16, 1945 US Army file photo shows prisoners of the German Buchenwald concentration camp inside their barracks, a few days after US troops liberated the camp near Weimar, Germany. The young man seventh from left in the middle row bunk is Elie Wiesel, who would later become an author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Wiesel, a 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, accompanied President Barack Obama on a tour of Buchenwald, on Friday June 5, 2009. (Copyright AP. Unauthorised reproduction prohibited.)
