Barack Obama to walk in footsteps of uncle who helped free Buchenwald
President Obama is preparing to follow in the footsteps of his great-uncle, Charlie, with a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany when he returns to Europe this summer.
The site is laden with historic and personal significance for the President. More than 50,000 people died at the camp before its liberation in April, 1945 by American soldiers, including Charlie Payne, the uncle of Mr Obama’s mother.
For the soldiers that stumbled over the corpses it was their first encounter with the Holocaust, and the horrors, relayed back home, helped to raise American consciousness of Nazi atrocities.
Read entire article at Times (UK)
The site is laden with historic and personal significance for the President. More than 50,000 people died at the camp before its liberation in April, 1945 by American soldiers, including Charlie Payne, the uncle of Mr Obama’s mother.
For the soldiers that stumbled over the corpses it was their first encounter with the Holocaust, and the horrors, relayed back home, helped to raise American consciousness of Nazi atrocities.