Posted By:
Toby Harnden at May 29, 2009
Barack Obama's great uncle Charles Payne has delivered some candid talk about just why his late sister's grandson is visiting the Buchenwald memorial next week during his trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, France and Germany.
"This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I'm sure, but for political reasons," Payne told "Der Spiegel", the German magazine. "Perhaps his visit also has something to do with improving his standing with [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel. She gave him a hard time during his campaign and also afterwards."
During the 2008 election campaign, Obama goofed when he said that Payne, 84, had liberated Auschwitz in 1945. In fact, Payne was part of the force that liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Payne told the German magazine that he was "quite surprised when the whole thing came up and Barack talked about my war experiences in Nazi Germany" and was not asked whether he minded his experiences being included in campaign commercials.
The pair had never even discussed the camp liberation and he suggested that Obama's grandparents were prone to a little embellishment of family tales. "My sister [Madelyn Dunham, who died last year] and her husband [Stanley Dunham, who died in 1992] were both great storytellers and sometimes made up the details to go along with it.
Newsmax has the
full story here.