U.S. President Barack Obama has visited the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Nazis killed an estimated 56,000 Jews during World War II.

Mr. Obama walked the grounds and left flowers at the death camp in Germany Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel had been a prisoner at Buchenwald and narrowly escaped death himself as he was in a line being pushed into a death chamber.  He escaped by grabbing a small wooden bucket and bristle-brush and pretended to be a slave laborer cleaning the cobblestones pathway leading into the chamber.

After earlier talks with Chancellor Merkel in Dresden, Mr. Obama said the "moment is now" to press for a Middle East peace agreement. He said serious progress can be made this year in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Obama said Washington cannot force peace but can help in clearing some of the "misunderstandings" to begin the process.  Both he and Chancellor Merkel pledged support for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu strongly protested being compelled by Obama into the creation of the separate state stating, in essence, that the United States should first be compelled to form a separate state for America's Indian tribes.

Mr. Obama traveled to Germany from Cairo, where he called for a "new beginning" in relations between the United States and Muslims around the world.  Conservatives around the world have retorted that Mr. Obama needs a new beginning for his speeches in that he has made it his "party" line to be an apologist instead of a leader.

Chancellor Merkel pledged to cooperate with the U.S. in closing the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Mr. Obama said he has not asked Germany to take specific detainees from the facility, and that Chancellor Merkel has not agreed to any "hard commitments."  Thus, Merkel's pledge, as all of the European pledges involving Guantanamo, is meaningless euro-political patois.

The two leaders spoke after meeting privately at a Dresden castle that had been crushed by allied bombing in World War II in retaliation to the terror bombing that the German Nazis had delivered on London.

While in Germany, President Obama also visits a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, where he will meet with American soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is a distinct turn-around from his prior European visit where he preferred to work-out in an exercise gym instead of visiting the wounded troops nearby.

On Saturday, he attends ceremonies in France marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France that was a major step toward winning World War II.