President Obama arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and camp survivors Elie Wiesel and Bertrand Herz.
Elie Wiesel, 80, a Nobel laureate, gave President Obama a first-hand account of what life was like in the camp, where 250,000 prisoners were held from 1937 to 1945.
The visit held great personal significance for the US president whose great-uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate Ohrdruf, a satellite camp of Buchenwald.
President Obama said the camp was �the ultimate rebuke� to those who denied the Holocaust had ever happened.
The tour of the camp showed the president where the prisoner barracks had stood and led past a crematorium with eight ovens.
President Obama and Mrs Merkel also visited the so-called Little Camp, where the conditions and treatment of prisoners were especially poor.
They each carried a long-stemmed white rose in memory of the estimated 56,000 people who died at the camp.
President Obama laid his rose on the "living memorial", a metal plaque on the ground which is heated to body temperature.
His rose was joined by three others on the site where survivors erected a temporary monument to the camp's liberation in April 1945.
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