Spiegel Interview with Obama's Great-Uncle:'I Was Horrified by Lengths Men Will Go to Mistreat Other

[Pirate Smile]

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH OBAMA'S GREAT-UNCLE
'I Was Horrified by Lengths Men Will Go to Mistreat Other Men'

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,1532928,00.jpg

Charles Payne: "I am unable to tell you what I was thinking then. That was a long time ago, and as I told you, until Barack misspoke, I hadn't thought about any of this for a very, very long time."

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.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,1534337,00.jpg

The Buchenwald concentration camp memorial near Weimar, Germany. Obama's great-uncle Charles Payne helped to liberate one of Buchenwald's satellite camps.

-snip-
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.

SPIEGEL: You were barely an adult as a soldier back then -- how did you wind up at such a place?

Payne: Everybody who was able-bodied was drafted. I went down right at the time I graduated and told the lady that ran the Selective Service office. I said, "I'm ready to go," and she said: "Don't you worry about it, honey. You're on the list." Since I had been colorblind since birth, I was first turned down by the Air Force, then by the Navy and the Marines. Only the Army didn't care and put me into the infantry.

SPIEGEL: You came from a small town in Kansas. Where did you receive your Army training?

Payne: The Army sent me to North Camp Hood, Texas, for basic training for 13 weeks. We learned to shoot, obey orders and to march.

SPIEGEL: What did you think about the Germans at the time?

Payne: They were the enemy, evil incarnate, and we were the good guys coming to save the world. We were all for the war. We all wanted to be in it. That doesn't mean we enjoyed being in it, though.

SPIEGEL: But it took years for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to convince US President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the necessity of entering into the war.

Payne: I think Roosevelt played it pretty smooth preparing people for the war. America at the time was isolationist, to a large extent. The majority were of the opinion that they should let Europe fight its own war. We were safe over here behind our ocean.

SPIEGEL: And you? Did you support America entering the war?

Payne: From the time I was in about the 7th grade, I knew there was going to be a war. There were these threatening headlines in the newspapers and more and more extra editions were coming out. Actually, in high school I never really worried much about going to college because I grew up expecting I would be in the Army and fight in a war.

SPIEGEL: What were your first experiences at the front?

Payne: At first there was no front. Because there were no facilities for our ship, we couldn't anchor in the harbor. Le Havre had been summarily bombed. They finally took us off in the middle of the night on landing barges. It was bitter cold and snowing. There was about three or four inches of water sloshing around in the bottom. So we landed at Le Havre in bitter cold with wet feet. Soon afterwards we had a large number of people who suffered from frostbite. The camp doctors were forced to amputate fingers, toes, and feet and send these soldiers back to the United States. For them the war was over.

SPIEGEL: Which route did you take to Buchenwald?

Payne: We marched through half of Europe, but I never really knew where I was. In combat we low-ranking people in the Army were not allowed to have maps, guide books, cameras or anything that, if captured, would provide any information to the enemy. So I never had a map when I was in Europe, and I never knew where I was. It was painful in some ways. I hated that because I like being oriented.

SPIEGEL: What was your job?

Payne: I was transferred from my unit to a telephone communication group. I was to be the guard for a crew of four people. Their job was to provide telephone communications for the command post wherever it would be that night. I stood around with my carbine and protected them.

SPIEGEL: Did you encounter any Germans during this long march?

Payne: When we went into a German town or village, there were never any people. We'd be there sometimes for hours and never see a soul, and I always felt like they were watching us. It was pretty spooky.

SPIEGEL: There was no direct contact with the enemy?

Payne: There were mainly sniper attacks. I do remember somewhere, we got out in some town and maybe off a truck or Jeep, and we were just standing there smoking, everybody lighting up their cigarette like always, and this one guy I knew took his helmet off and was immediately shot through the head and fell.

SPIEGEL: When did you hear the term "concentration camp" for the first time?

Payne: You know, I don't remember that I had heard about or knew about concentration camps where people were systematically killed off or starved. That is one of the horrors I remember, when people had been systematically starved and were nothing but skin sunk in over bones. There was no underlying flesh at all. It was pretty horrid.

SPIEGEL: Do you remember the day when you discovered the Ohrdruf camp?

Payne: Ohrdruf was in that string of towns going across, south of Gotha and Erfurt. Our division was the first one in there. When we arrived there were no German soldiers anywhere around that I knew about. There was no fighting with the Germans, no camp guards. The whole area was overrun by people from the camp dressed in the most pitiful rags, and most of them were in a bad state of starvation. The first thing I saw was a dead body lying square in the middle of the front gate.

SPIEGEL: A camp inmate?

Payne: It turns out that it was Polish or Russian camp inmate, who had gone over and become a guard for the Nazis. So he was guarding and helping starve the other people. Then when the Americans came, he tried to blend in with the regular inmates. But they recognized him and beat his head in with a tire iron.

SPIEGEL: What else did you see?

Payne: Inside the gate was an area where a bunch of the camp inmates had been machine gunned and were all lying on the ground. Each one had their tin cup in their hand or lying next to them.

SPIEGEL: What were your thoughts when you were confronted with these images?

Payne: You know, I am unable to tell you what I was thinking then. That was a long time ago, and as I told you, until Barack misspoke, I hadn't thought about any of this for a very, very long time. In fact, I guess I prefer not to think about it. I can assure you I was horrified by the lengths to which men will go to mistreat other men. This was, to me, almost unbelievable. There was more: There were sheds full of dead bodies that had been stripped and thrown in and then stacked up on top of each other. I don't know how many, but many high and the whole length of the room. They sprinkled lime to keep the smell down. That's about the extent that I remember actually seeing.

-snip-
SPIEGEL: You're a Democrat?

Payne: I was a Democrat from way, way before Barack was born.

SPIEGEL: Are you proud of your great-nephew?

Payne: Yes, naturally. I was at the Democratic Convention in Denver, where I was introduced by Senator John Kerry, and then also at his inauguration. He encompasses so much: self assuredness, competency, leadership and the great good luck that he had. Finally he had the good luck, if you will, of the financial crisis that got him elected, but now he also has to deal with it.

SPIEGEL: How would you describe your relationship with Barack?

Payne: Our relationship is warm and friendly, but I'm not part of his inner circle. We always have an interesting chat when we get in the same room together. He doesn't call me up and ask what I have to say about world policy or anything. And I never offer my opinions on any of this.

SPIEGEL: And will you join your great-nephew on his trip now to Germany?

Payne: If he invites me on Air Force One, I'll be there.


http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,626703,00.html

[ClarkUSA]

1. Thanks for a poignant read.

[bunkerbuster1]

2. And thanks to Spiegel for interviewing him in the first place.

[Pirate Smile]

3. AP has a big article on Obama's grandfather.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hpNZT-PTwpHmYIZ14NQHA1ddDJxgD98GJ4Q00

Obama's Gramps: Gazing skyward on D-Day in England
By NANCY BENAC – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Surely, Stanley Dunham was gazing skyward 65 years ago, on D-Day.
Dunham, the man whom Barack Obama would one day call Gramps, was a 26-year-old supply sergeant stationed near the English Channel with the U.S. Army Air Forces when the invasion of Normandy at last began. Six weeks later, he crossed the Channel, too, and followed the Allied front across France. A year later, he was on track to fight in Japan when the atom bomb sent him home instead.

Dunham, who died 17 years ago, was the Kansas-born grandfather with the outsized personality who helped to fill the hole in the future president's life created by the absence of Obama's Kenyan father. Sgt. Dunham's war years have been something of a mystery, the details of dates and places lost with the passage of time. The units that he served in were unknown even to the White House.

-snip-
To the 75 men of Dunham's company, he was a good guy to have around.
For one thing, he taught the men how to use their new gas masks.
He also came up with a radio, games and books for a day room that Dunham's commanding officer described as "a swell place to spend an evening."

And when the 1830th had a party in the gym three days after D-Day, they had Dunham to thank for it.
On May 31, 1944, payday, Dunham had taken up a collection of 35 British pounds — about $150 in today's dollars — to finance the event. He lined up a convoy of girls from Southampton who, the men hoped, would be "simply smashing," as his commanding officer, Frederick Maloof, wrote in his diary.

"The party was a huge success, except that the beer ran out about 10:30 p.m.," 1st Lt. Maloof later reported. "All agreed that the orchestra was good. A few of the die-hards were still crooning over the empty beer barrels at an early morning hour."

-snip-
Obama sketches Dunham as a man with a wild streak early on who settled down to sell furniture and life insurance.
By the time he joined the Army, he already had lived large.
He'd been thrown out of his high school in El Dorado, Kan., for punching the principal in the nose. For three years he'd lived off odd jobs, "hopping rail cars to Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards and women," Obama wrote in his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father."

Dunham had also fallen in love with a woman from the other side of the tracks — the good side — and married her. He eloped with Madelyn Payne just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, and he was quick to enlist after the Japanese attack.
"He was really gung-ho," remembers Ralph. "He didn't have to go because he was married. He could have held off."

[bunkerbuster1]

4. Wonderful article. Thanks for the link.

loved this bit at the end, very touching:

Ralph Dunham is reminded of his brother every time Obama's face appears on TV or in the paper.

"You know," Ralph says, "he looks exactly like Stanley. He looks exactly like my brother, only he's dark."

[Wednesdays]

5. K&R

:kick:

[Schema Thing]

6. heh: "I had been colorblind since birth"

[Uncle Joe]

7. This was a good article and well worth the read.

Thanks for the thread, Pirate Smile.

Kicked and recommended.

[Pirate Smile]

8. Did you see the AP article on his Grandfather in post 3. If not, you would probably like it too.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hpNZT-PTwpHmYIZ14NQHA1ddDJxgD98GJ4Q00

[Uncle Joe]

15. Thanks for the link Pirate Smile.

Peace to you.:hi:

[Pirate Smile]

9. kick

[vaberella]

10. Ooh, fantastic read. Good stuff. Is he all Obama has left, besides his sis on his mum's side?n/t

[vaberella]

11. Something I noted...it was when he spoke about the pile of bodies

and the lengths man would take to hurt other men. The first thing that came to mind is the torture pics of Abu Ghraib when those soldiers piled the bodies. I want all the soldiers in prison. I don't care if they took orders, those asses enjoyed it and I want all of them to pay.

[Pirate Smile]

12. kick

[stevedeshazer]

13. Most highly recommended. Outstanding.

1000 of these men die every day. Every one has a unique story to tell.

[Drunken Irishman]

14. "I was a Democrat way, way before Barack was born."

:patriot:

[FrenchieCat]

16. Kick! Too late to rec. :(

[Pirate Smile]

17. Did you see the AP article on Gramps? I want to know why he punched his Principal which got him

kicked out of High School.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hpNZT-PTwpHmYIZ14NQHA1ddDJxgD98GJ4Q00