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May

27

Obama campaign corrects factual error re: family member & WWII liberation


Here’s the original post (with the update too).

From Ben Smith at Politico:

Earlier, the Republican National Committee pounced on Obama’s improbable statement that an uncle had served in the unit that liberated Auschwitz.

In fact, campaign spokesman Bill Burton says, his great uncle was a member of the 89th Infantry Division that liberated the Ohrduf camp, part of Buchenwald and, according to the Holocaust Museum, the first concentration camp liberated by U.S. troops.

The soldier in question, Burton said, is Obama’s grandmother’s brother, who’s still alive.

UPDATE: “Senator Obama’s family is proud of the service of his grandfather and uncles in World War II – especially the fact that his great uncle was a part of liberating one of the concentration camps at Buchenwald. Yesterday he mistakenly referred to Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald in telling of his personal experience of a soldier in his family who served heroically,” Burton says.

Having been to Dachau and lived through years of education about the Holocaust, it’s a little disconcerting. But it’s not the worst gaffe ever made about WWII heroics, or suffering (remember best-selling authors who fabricated entire stories of claiming to be Holocaust survivors, when they weren’t?). He could have just used the generic “Nazi concentration camps.” But whatever – sadly, I imagine that many if not most Americans would make the same mistake too.

Good fast correction.

Moving on.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 5:31 pm May 27th, 2008 in Barack Obama, Campaigning, Democrats, Foreign Affairs, Jewish, Military, Politics, Religion, WH2008 

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