Obama's uncle, Charles Payne, recounts the liberation of Ohrdruf

Remember, in May, how the right wingers went into a frenzy because Obama named the wrong concentration camp when speaking of his uncle, Charlie Payne, who served in World War II? And, many of the traditional media types, including the Washington Post, played along like it was some kind of game. Oh, they really thought they caught Obama in a whopper.

Obama told a true story about his uncle's involvement with liberating a Nazi concentration camp -- and admitted that he got the name of the camp wrong. Jake Tapper wrote an excellent piece putting this issue into context. Tapper also made the point that Obama never raised this issue on its own. He brought it up in response to a question about veterans and PTSD.

Now, Obama's uncle, who is clearly very proud of his nephew, has come forward to tell his story of arriving at Ohrdruf:

Charles T. Payne was 20 years old and, like any good Midwesterner, he knew how to listen.

He was making conversation, in pieced-together English and German, with a freed prisoner of Ohrdruf, the Nazi work camp Payne's infantry division had just liberated at the end of World War II.

"With great difficulty we conversed and, if I got what it was he was telling me about, it was that the Germans had killed a million Jews and that the world didn't really know this yet," Payne, 83, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday as, on the other side of the world, his great-nephew, Barack Obama, prepared to visit the Yad Vashem national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Helping liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, in April 1945 was Payne's first close brush with history.

Like his nephew, Mr. Payne is clearly a very smart and thoughtful man:

As attention turns to the Holocaust with Obama's expected visit to the Israeli memorial on Wednesday, Payne reflected on the lessons of history.

"Clearly to me it's proof that there's no limit to what a man will do to man and what government out of control will do," he said. "I guess we need to be on our guard eternally."

We sure do.