U.S. president Barack Obama is on his second visit to Europe on Thursday in 10 weeks after previously attending a NATO summit jointly hosted by Germany and France at the beginning of April.

Obama arrived in Dresden, Eastern Germany on Thursday evening from Egypt and will travel to France on Saturday where he plans to attend ceremonies in Normandy, marking the 65th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landings.

No high-profile speeches are scheduled for his visit to Germany and France.

On Friday, Obama visited Buchenwald, a former Nazi concentration camp outside the town of Weimar, together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The visit to the former Nazi concentration camp was not proposed by the Germans, but by the White House, apparently as a gesture of balance in the Arab-Israeli conflict after Obama's Thursday speech in Cairo calling for a fresh start in relations with the Muslim world.

At Buchenwald, Merkel and the U.S. president were being guided by Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who spent the last months of the Second World War in the camp.

The Buchenwald was the largest Nazi concentration camp on German soil. Around 56,000 prisoners died through execution or maltreatment before the camp was liberated by US forces in April 1945. It is now a memorial.

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