Vice President JD Vance will visit the site of the Dachau concentration camp on Thursday, the latest in a string of senior US officials to travel to the former Nazi camp.
Vance will visit Dachau before heading to the nearby Munich Security Conference, an elite national security gathering, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday. He wrote on social media that his visit to Europe is focusing on artificial intelligence policy.
He will also meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who will be key to President Donald Trump’s professed goal of ending the Russia-Ukraine war.
Vance is the latest vice president to visit Dachau, one of the first camps built by the Nazi regime. Joe Biden visited with his granddaughter in 2015, when he was serving as vice president, and has taken the trip with other children and grandchildren as well. Vice President Mike Pence visited Dachau in 2017.
In 2023, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, went on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland, including a visit to Auschwitz.
Criticism for VP's visit
However, one Jewish group criticized Vance’s impending visit due to controversy over ties between the far-right and the Trump administration.
Top Trump adviser Elon Musk stirred considerable controversy last month when he made a gesture that resembled a Nazi salute, then made Holocaust jokes on the social network X/Twitter. More recently, Vance pushed Musk to rehire a staffer who had publicly self-identified as a racist.
“Mr. @VP, in the name of my mother, who survived the concentration camps, until you condemn the many connections to neo-Nazis in your new administration, please stay off of the sacred ground upon which our parents and grandparents were slaughtered,” Jonathan Jacoby, a longtime liberal activist who directs the Nexus Project, an antisemitism-focused organization, said in a statement on X Tuesday.