front of the former camp crematorium.
He told AFP in an interview recently that when the liberation of Dachau came, he was simply “waiting to die”.
“We were no longer normal human beings, we weren’t yet animals, but only just”, the 94-year-old former resistance member, who lives in western France, said.He also described being subjected to SS medical experiments during his 10 months at Dachau, with the camp’s doctors infecting him with tuberculosis.
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said Merkel’s presence together with survivors was a “sign of solidarity”.
He called for the memory of the Holocaust to remain strong, warning that, with time, “distance grows, empathy diminishes” and urged the younger generation to uphold the “responsibility” of never forgetting, even if they were not culprits.
US President Barack Obama paid tribute on Wednesday to the more than 200,000 Jews, gays, Roma, political opponents, the disabled and prisoners of war who were imprisoned at Dachau from 1933.
The Nazis opened Dachau as a concentration camp for political prisoners in March 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler took power.
It was the first such site in Germany and served as a model for all the camps to follow.
On the eve of the ceremony, Merkel stressed in her weekly podcast message Germany’s “particular responsibility”, 70 years after the end of World War II and warned there was no question of drawing a line under history.
“We Germans have a particular responsibility here to handle what we perpetrated in the period of National Socialism attentively, sensitively and also knowledgeably,” she said.
In 2013 Merkel became the first German chancellor to go to the former Dachau concentration camp but faced criticism for including the visit on an election campaign swing ahead of a beer-tent rally for supporters.
Last year she was awarded the General Andre Delpech Prize by an association of former prisoners at the Dachau camp, named after a former inmate.
The irongate to the former death camp which bears the chilling inscription “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Will Set You Free) has had to be replaced after the original was stolen by thieves from the camp’s memorial last year.