Dachau camp liberation remembered

More than 1,000 survivors of the Nazis' first concentration camp in Dachau near Munich marked the 60th anniversary of their liberation on Sunday, together with US army veterans who threw open the gates. The Catholic archbishop of the Bavarian state capital Munich, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, said that "human dignity had been trampled underfoot" at Dachau, which was built in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler rose to power. On 29 April, 1945, nine days before the German surrender in World War II, US soldiers arrived at Dachau to find scene of horror. Piles of corpses lay in cattle trucks while starving prisoners were almost too weak to acknowledge their salvation. Between 1933 and 1945, more than 200,000 people from 38 countries were held by the Nazis under appalling conditions. At least 30,000 people were killed, starved or died of disease. Sunday's ceremony was marred by complaints by a German Jewish group that it was held on the Jewish holiday Passover.