President Obama is preparing to follow in the footsteps of his great-uncle, Charlie, with a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany when he returns to Europe this summer.

The site is laden with historic and personal significance for the President. More than 50,000 people died at the camp before its liberation in April, 1945 by American soldiers, including Charlie Payne, the uncle of Mr Obama’s mother.

For the soldiers that stumbled over the corpses it was their first encounter with the Holocaust, and the horrors, relayed back home, helped to raise American consciousness of Nazi atrocities.

Although the White House said yesterday that it was unable to confirm claims that Mr Obama would visit Buchenwald and Dresden next month, almost every senior official in the states of Thüringia and Saxony already appears to have been informed about the impending trip. Secret Service advance units are said to have checked out the hotel, a restored palace, where he may stay in Dresden.

Times Archive, 1945: The horrors of Buchenwald

A policy of steady starvation and inhuman brutality marked the lowest point of degradation to which humanity had descended

• Archive Topic: Concentration Camps

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He is expected to travel to Buchenwald on June 5, the day before taking part in commemoration events for the 65th anniversary of the landing of Allied troops in Normandy.

Thomas Steg, spokesman for the German Government, said that Mr Obama might visit “historical places that in the widest sense are related to the different aspects of World War Two — destruction and rebuilding, extermination and the breakdown of civilisation”, as well as places which have “biographical references” for his family.

During the election campaign Mr Obama sought regularly to deflect any suggestion that his exotic multinational background meant that he lacked patriotism by pointing out how his maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, had “marched with Patton’s army” after the Normandy landings.

However, a reference to Charlie Payne’s service in the 89th Infantry Division during the war, which showed that he was vague about some details of his family’s history, briefly threatened to embarrass him.

Mr Obama, speaking in May last year about the need to screen the US military for signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, said: “I had a uncle who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. And the story in my family is that when he came home, he went into the attic, and he didn’t leave the house for six months.

“Obviously something had affected him deeply but at the time there weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

After Republicans gleefully pointed out it had been the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz Mr Obama was forced to issue a correction by saying his uncle had been among the troops that freed Ohrdruf, a satellite forced-labour camp close to Buchenwald.

The sight of mass graves and starved inmates haunted many of those soldiers long afterwards. The director of the Buchenwald museum, Volkhard Knigge, is planning for the President to pay tribute to the saving of 903 children who scrabbled for existence in Buchenwald.

It was, he said, “not only a huge sign of solidarity and humanity on the part of the adult inmates but also the US soldiers”.

There was speculation in Berlin that Mr Obama could be accompanied by the Nobel prizewinner Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Buchenwald, on the visit.

Visiting a concentration camp will send an important message to Israel and Jewish voters back home — who have sometimes been suspicious towards him — that he fully recognises the horrors of the Holocaust.

But he will be aware of the sensibilities of his German hosts before the D-Day commemoration and by travelling to Dresden — a city destroyed by ferocious Allied bombing in February 1945 — Mr Obama will also acknowledge how Germany suffered during the Second World War.

An added advantage of Dresden over Berlin is that he will not be seen to be backing Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, at the outset of her election campaign.

Although the German Government insists that the two leaders have good relations, Mrs Merkel barred Mr Obama from speaking under the Brandenburg Gate last summer and later blocked efforts to secure a bigger economic stimulus package at the G20 summit in London.

The Chancellor is still expected to come down to Dresden to see Mr Obama, but the talks will be without the trappings of an official state visit.

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