German Chancellor Angela Merkel to visit Dachau camp

Dachau was the first camp to be built by the Nazis in 1933

Angela Merkel is to visit the former Nazi concentration camp of Dachau later on Tuesday, in the first such visit to the site by a German chancellor.

She will make a speech warning of the continuing threat from the far right before touring the camp, where tens of thousands were murdered.

The visit is part of Mrs Merkel's election campaign and will be followed by a rally in a beer tent nearby.
Political opponents have called the combination "tasteless".

After making a short speech, Mrs Merkel is to lay a wreath of flowers and tour the remnants of the camp late on Tuesday afternoon.

Max Mannheimer, the 93-year-old president of the Dachau camp committee, has long lobbied for Mrs Merkel to go to the camp, near Munich in southern Germany.

He hailed her decision as "historic" and a "signal of respect for the former detainees".

But a leader of the opposition Greens party, Renate Kuenast, described Mrs Merkel's programme of the camp visit followed by an election rally as a "tasteless and outrageous combination".

"If you're serious about commemoration at such a place of horrors, then you don't pay such a visit during an election campaign," she told the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung.

Some 30,000 people died in Dachau before it was liberated by US soldiers on 29 April 1945.
It was the first camp to be built by the Nazis in March 1933.

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