German president visits concentration camp

Joachim Gauck and Czech counterpart attend memorial at Terezin, lay wreath honoring victims of Nazism

PRAGUE — Germany’s president has visited the former Nazi concentration camp in Terezin where tens of thousands perished during the Holocaust.

Together with his Czech counterpart Milos Zeman, President Joachim Gauck laid a wreath Tuesday to honor some 35,000 victims who died there during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. More than 100,000 others were transported from Terezin to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

It was a second such reconciliatory gesture by Gauck after he visited Lidice during his previous trip to the Czech Republic two years ago, a town completely destroyed by the Nazis, who also killed all its male citizens.

In a speech at Prague’s Charles University, Gauck called the occupation and the subsequent expulsion of some 3 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia the “sad culmination” of relations between neighbors.