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WEIMAR — President Barack Obama, the first U.S. president to visit Buchenwald, walked through the former Nazi concentration camp with someone very familiar with its history: Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
Obama invited the Nobel Peace Prize winner to join him for a somber tour of the site where 56,000 people died during the Holocaust. Many of them were Jews, including Wiesel's father.
"Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart," said Wiesel, who flew to the former camp on Obama's presidential helicopter.
"What else can we do, except invoke that memory so that people everywhere can say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings filled with promise and infinite hope and, at times, profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition?"
Wiesel and his family were deported from what is now Romania to Auschwitz, another concentration camp where his mother and younger sister died. He was then moved to Buchenwald, where his father died three months before the camp was liberated in 1945.
The visit also had personal significance for Obama: a great-uncle helped liberate a nearby satellite camp, Ohrdruf, days before other U.S. Army units overran Buchenwald.
Wiesel, Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel laid white roses at a memorial and toured the crematorium, where victims' bodies were burned.
They were joined during the tour by Bertrand Herz, a Buchenwald survivor and president of the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee, and Buchenwald memorial chief Volkhard Knigge.
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Before Buchenwald, Obama and Merkel took another tour, this one through the Church of Our Lady.
The two leaders and senior White House officials visited the 11th century church, which was destroyed during the World War II firebombing of Dresden. Residents left the burned-out ruins standing in the city center for decades as a reminder of the war's costs.
Reconstruction took more than two decades, but it was re-consecrated in 2005.
The visiting group bowed their heads at the altar.
Obama and Merkel also visited an iron cross that once stood atop the church. The original cross was discovered in 1993 and made into a monument known as The Old Tower Cross.
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When Obama visited Germany during the presidential campaign last summer, his political rival snidely said he was greeted as a rock star. This week, Obama was greeted with real rock stars.
Several thousand people jammed during a "Welcome, Mr. President" festival outside the city center where Obama and Merkel met. In Dresden's Altmarkt square, jazz and rock bands performed on a stage decorated with red, white and blue streamers and balloons.
Echoes of Obama's earlier political trip also chased him.
Later Friday, he spent about two hours at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. military facility, visiting privately with American troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, blasted Obama for not visiting troops last summer. At the time, Obama aides said they didn't think it was appropriate for a political candidate to visit a military facility during the campaign.
Obama also didn't go to Landstuhl when he visited Germany in April.
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Obama had a message for reporters seeking signs of friction between him and Merkel: "Stop it, all of you."
The remark brought laughter from reporters in the room, but underscored differences between the United States and Germany, particularly on what to do with suspected terrorists held at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and economic recovery.
Before Obama's visit, news and analysis of the alleged strain filled newspapers and airwaves, citing the president's shifting itinerary as evidence and attributing it to lingering sore feelings over Merkel's refusal to let him speak in front of Berlin's landmark Brandenburg Gate last July when he was a presidential candidate.
Merkel's office has repeatedly said, however, that no bad blood flows between them — something Merkel emphasized as she stood beside Obama.
"It is really a lot of fun to work with the American president, because a very deep and analytical discussion will very often lead us to the same assessment," Merkel said.
Obama downplayed any differences with the U.S. ally, which Obama has visited three times in the past year.
"I think your characterization of wild speculations is accurate — they are very wild and based on no facts," Obama told a German TV reporter. "The truth of the matter is that the relationship not only between our two countries but our two governments is outstanding."
Obama said journalists should find something else to write about: "I know you have to find something to report on, but we have more than enough problems out there without manufacturing problems."
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AP White House Correspondent Jennifer Loven and Associated Press writer Melissa Eddy in Dresden contributed to this report.
