US President Barack Obama travelled to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, Germany, on 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, rounded on 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,” Obama said, echoing his words in Cairo in an address that reached for what he called a “new beginning” in the relationship between the US and the Muslim world.

By visiting Buchenwald on Friday, he also underscored what he termed in Cairo America’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel. Obama has been pushing hard during this trip for a two-state solution in West Asia, 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, Obama said the site was the “ultimate rebuke” to those who deny or seek to minimise 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.”

The camp where 56,000 people died also bears a particular significance for Germans, embodying the contradiction of a civilised society’s descent into organised barbarism.

With his hands behind his back and a thoughtful expression on his face, 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.

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