Posted on 06/05/2009 5:35:39 AM PDT by SJackson
President Barack Obama's planned visit to the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald on June 5 will have special significance because his great uncle, Charlie Payne, was one of the American soldiers who liberated a sub-camp of Buchenwald sixty-four years ago.
In this April 16, 1945 black and white file photo, Buchenwald inmates are seen inside their barracks a few days after US troops liberated the concentration camp near Weimar. Photo: AP On April 4, 1945, Payne's unit came across the sub-camp, called Ohrdruf, as they chased the retreating German army. The Nazi guards had already abandoned the camp and forced most of the prisoners to take part in a death march. They left behind piles of emaciated corpses.
Ohrdruf was the first Nazi concentration camp that the American army encountered, and it was there, eight days later, that General Dwight Eisenhower saw the disturbing sights that prompted him to invite journalists and Members of Congress to view the evidence of Nazi atrocities first hand.
"The things I saw beggar description," he wrote. "The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick."
Then-candidate Obama spoke of his great-uncle on the presidential campaign trail last year. Urging increased funding for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers, Obama said that when Charlie returned home, "he just went up into the attic and he didn't leave the house for six months. Now obviously something had really affected him deeply, but at that time, there just weren't the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain."
The horror that Charlie and his fellow-GIs felt upon seeing the Nazis' victims was compounded by the fact that they were completely unprepared for what they were about to see. Although the army's senior brass was fully informed about the Nazis' mass murder of millions of European Jews, ordinary soldiers were never told what they were likely to see as they made their way through formerly Axis-controlled territory.
"A CONCENTRATION CAMP at Dachau was a complete surprise to all of us," recalled Col. Walter J. Fellenz, a commander of the First Battalion, which was involved in liberating that camp.
Likewise George Oiye, of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion: "We were not ordered to take Dachau; we just kind of stumbled on to it. I didn't even know it existed."
Staff Sgt. Johnnie Stevens of the 761st Tank Battalion, which helped liberate Gunskirchen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen: "At the time, we did not know those camps existed. Our government lied to us. We were not prepared for what we found."
Army publications were no help. Consider the experience of Sgt. Richard Paul, a reporter for Yank, an army magazine for soldiers. In October 1944 - six months before Obama's great-uncle entered Ohrdruf Sgt. Paul submitted an article about the mass murder of the Jews in Auschwitz, the editors of Yank turned it down, saying it was "too Semitic." They told him to rewrite it so that it "did not deal principally with Jews."
The army's other magazine, Stars and Stripes, was no different. It was not until April 1945 that Stars and Stripes finally published articles about Nazi atrocities and concentration camps, and even then, the articles did not mention Jews. The average GI reading Stars and Strips had no way of knowing that Jews were the main victims of the Nazis.
The line followed by Yank and Stars and Stripes was unfortunately consistent with the approach of the Roosevelt administration as a whole. Calling attention to the fact that the Jews were being singled out for persecution would have increased pressure on the US government to grant them refuge - something President Franklin Roosevelt did not want to do.
The chiefs of the US Office of War Information instructed their staff that coverage of the Nazi mass-murders would be "confused and misleading if it appears to be simply affecting the Jewish people."
A meeting of the American, British, and Soviet foreign ministers in Moscow in October 1943 issued a statement threatening postwar punishment for Nazi war crimes against conquered populations. It mentioned "French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages ...Cretan peasants ... the people of Poland" but not Jews.
In a similar spirit, General Eisenhower himself removed all references to Jews from a leaflet the Allies air-dropped over Europe in September 1944, threatening to punish anyone who collaborated in Nazi atrocities against civilians. Even President Roosevelt's 1944 message commemorating the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt - a rebellion by Jewish fighters - did not mention the Jews.
Arthur Szyk, the famous artist and Holocaust rescue activist, remarked bitterly that Europe's Jews were being "treat[ed] as a pornographical subject you cannot discuss it in polite society."
On several recent occasions, President Obama expressed regrets about some past US policies and their impact abroad. Perhaps his visit to Buchenwald, and his memories of what happened to his great-uncle, will inspire the president to say a few words about the Roosevelt administration's appalling policy toward Europe's Jews during the Holocaust and about the lessons to be learned, in order to help stop genocide today.
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I thouhgt that was just another Delusion of My Father?
I read an article on Freerepublic recently that exposed this claim as a lie.
By the end of Obama’s term, he was have more Jewish blood on his hands than Hitler. Obama is feeding the Jews to the Islam Extremists.
I think that is why they now say ‘sub-camp’, it was not actually Buchenwald.
Traitorous, rebellious-to-God, duplicitous . . .
jerks . . .
Shame on you, Ike. I thought you had more of a spine, than that.
Obviously, the oligarchy was calling the MSM shots then, as well.
I thought the “didn’t leave the attic for six months” thing was a lie as well.
That's because the Jews weren't the main victims of the Nazis.
The records on the numbers of people killed are imprecise, but odds are the Nazis killed at least as many Gentiles as Jews.
Recall the writings of Rev. Niemoller.
It happened, maybe the attic thing, that doesn't pass the smell test to me. His great uncle says Obama's visit is a publicity stunt.
Obama's Great-Uncle Says President Visiting Concentration Camp Site for 'Political Reasons'
So what's the problem, as the article notes Stars and Stripes acknowledged the killing of non-Jews, they just Jews out. Which is fine, the secret couldn't be kept.
IIRC, the devil was in the details. Obama said his uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, when it was actually the sub-camp of Buchenwald. He got the details wrong but the story was essentially true.
Said uncle would have been 62 at the time of the liberation.
Far too old for front line infantry duty.
But, also because he supports a nuclear Iran and Ahmadinejad has repeatedly stated his desire to remove Israel from the map.
History is attempting to repeat itself as the Nazi ovens to incinerate Jews in WWII become the Iranian nukes to incinerate Jews in Israel and obama shows no interest in stopping it.
While Jews were not the only ones incarcerated and murdered in the Holocaust, I do believe they were the single largest group targeted of all.
As even you say, it took all the other groups to total, or approach the numbers of Jews estimated murdered.
Just to be realistic and hard-nosed, consider that our propaganda was directed to the sole objective of winning the war. Would publicizing the plight of Jews have enhanced what was already a complete national mobilization in the U.S.? Would it have encouraged our European allies and potential allies, many of whom were anti-Semitic to some degree, to fight harder? As for Eisenhower, without him and his troops, those camps might never have been liberated.
If you are talking sheer numbers, maybe. But if you are talking about a portion of the population, nobody suffered as much as the Jews. Not homosexuals, gypsies or anyone else.
However, there was a practical reason for the Allies downplaying references to the Jews as victims in the leaflets they dropped: the German populace had been subect to 12 years of 24/7 nazi propoganda painting the Jews as the evil cause of their problems. If you take the last eight years or so of enemedia Bush bashing and multiply it tenfold, you begin to get the idea. The American sheeple is still giving ObaMao a pass even though he owns the current recession and the nazi rule actually improved the German economy shortly after Hitler came to power.
How is he able to comment on BO’s trip now? Didn't he accompany BO on the trip? Who the hell is the guy that BO is talking about?
I really want to see Hussien’s family tree, because it would have to be one of the most twisted and dysfunctional families ever.
I believe it’s an “uncle” that is commenting now,
and a “great uncle” who supposedly liberated Auchwitz.
I hope touring Buchenwald doesn’t give ‘resident Obama any ideas about ‘concentrating’ his political opposition.
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