SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH OBAMA'S GREAT-UNCLE

[grassfed]

'I Was Horrified by Lengths Men Will Go to Mistreat Other Men'

Barack Obama's great uncle was one of the soldiers who liberated a subcamp of Buchenwald. One week before the US president's planned stopover in Germany, where he is expected to visit the concentration camp memorial, SPIEGEL spoke to Charles Payne, 84, about his experiences in WWII.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Payne, early in June your great-nephew, President Barack Obama, will visit the former concentration camp Buchenwald, which you helped liberate at the end of the war. Will he be travelling in your footsteps?

Charles Payne: I don't buy that. I was quite surprised when the whole thing came up and Barack talked about my war experiences in Nazi Germany. We had never talked about that before. This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I'm sure, but for political reasons.

SPIEGEL: What do you think could be his motives for this trip?

Payne: First, I think he already had this trip in mind -- with Cairo on the one end and Normandy at the other, and time for Germany in between. Second, perhaps his visit also has something to do with improving his standing with Angela Merkel. She gave him a hard time during his campaign and also afterwards.

SPIEGEL: At first Mr. Obama claimed that one of his family members was involved in the liberation Auschwitz. How did this misunderstanding come about?

Payne: He couldn't have gotten it from me since we had never talked about this particular episode in the war. My sister and her husband were both great storytellers and sometimes made up the details to go along with it. They told him about my deployment with the 89th Infantry Division and apparently they mixed up a few details. Of course it came out immediately that he was wrong since there are enough people in America who know that Auschwitz is in the East and that the camp was liberated by the Red Army.

SPIEGEL: Afterwards, Obama called you. What did he want to know?

Payne: He wanted to know where this camp was that I had helped liberate. I told him that it was Ohrdruf and that it was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. I described a little bit of what I had seen.

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