In the Spiegal interview Payne states that he was in the 89th Infantry and that Obama’s gaffe was naming the wrong concentration camp, Payne was at Ohrdruf not Auschwitz.
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.