Obama: Be vigilant against evil

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