The wrong camp

Barack Obama admits that he goofed in saying his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz:

Democrat Barack Obama admitted on Tuesday he was wrong to say his uncle helped liberate the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp after Republicans said Soviet troops freed the camp.

Obama's campaign said the candidate meant to say that his great-uncle, Charlie Payne, had helped liberate a part of the Buchenwald camp, not Auschwitz.

"Yesterday he mistakenly referred to Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald in telling of his personal experience of a soldier in his family who served heroically," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Burton said in the statement that Obama's great uncle served in the 89th Infantry Division that entered Germany in 1945 and on April 4 overran Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Obama had made the Auschwitz reference in a Memorial Day speech on Monday.

More than 1 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at Auschwitz, an extermination camp in Poland. Buchenwald in Germany was mainly a forced labor camp, where some 56,000 people are believed to have died.

I figured as much. The Nazis ran several extermination and slave-labor camps, but Auschwitz remains the best-known by a wide margin. The word itself has come to symbolize Nazi barbarity, and I believe Obama's error was understandable - especially during the stress of a presidential campaign.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at May 28, 2008 07:58 AM