TacticalPeek (1000+ posts) Tue May-27-08 06:14 PM
Original message http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6149907
Obama misspeaks. Where in the world is Auschwitz?
Advertisements [?]Edited on Tue May-27-08 06:26 PM by TacticalPeek
Candidate Watch
Where in the world is Auschwitz?
"I had an uncle who was one of the, um, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. And the story in our family is that when he came home he just went up in the attic and he didn't leave the house for six months."
--Barack Obama, Memorial Day speech, Las Cruces, NM.
In an attempt to burnish his credentials with America's veterans, Barack Obama has frequently talked about his grandfather "who served in Patton's army." He has now added a new episode to his World War II repertoire: the uncle who liberated Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the story shows that the presumptive Democratic nominee has a poor grasp of European history and geography.
The Facts
UPDATED FRIDAY 5:30 P.M.
Auschwitz is located in southern Poland, near the city of Krakow. It was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. At the time, U.S. armies were still on the western borders of Germany, a thousand miles away, regrouping after the Battle of the Bulge. The Americans had not even crossed the Rhine at this point.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/whe...
More ad fodder for 'untrustworthy'.
even the DUmmies are ragging on Barry for this one...
Bornaginhooligan (1000+ posts) Tue May-27-08 06:16 PM
Response to Original message
2. It turns out it was Buchenwald, not Auschwitz.
Makes you look pretty dumb, doesn't it?
Was it? Has Barry made a correction?
tokenlib (1000+ posts) Tue May-27-08 06:18 PM
Response to Original message
9. And some of the Auschwitz prisoners had been sent to Buchenwald....
Edited on Tue May-27-08 06:19 PM by tokenlib
...so there.... it was a misspeak--but essentially true except for the name switch.
Oooo...the old Factually truth line. Good one.
beachmom (1000+ posts) Tue May-27-08 06:34 PM
Response to Reply #23
31. No, you are a smear artist, and you are "Higginsboating" Obama's great uncle
Who liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohrdruf_forced_labor_camp
The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:
. . .the most interesting--although horrible--sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda
.'
Wait...a third concentration camp that barry's grandfather might have liberated?
K Gardner (1000+ posts) Tue May-27-08 06:56 PM
Response to Reply #23
36. What's the difference between Auschwitz and Buchenwald.. jerk.
Plenty.
One of the major Nazi concentration camps was set up in 1937 at Buchenwald, on the Ettersberg Hill near Weimar in Thüringen. Buchenwald remained one of the major camps throughout the history of the Third Reich, with numerous subcamps under its administration. Buchenwald was not, per se, an extermination camp (such as Auschwitz), but prisoners were starved, maltreated, and worked to death in the camp quarry and adjacent armaments factories. Russian POWs and others were executed and cremated. Buchenwald was also made infamous by Ilse Koch, wife of camp commandant Karl Koch. Frau Koch had a fancy for prisoners' tattoos, and would often have these flayed from the victims and preserved, sometimes as lampshades. Jews and Gypsies were transported from Buchenwald to extermination camps further east, for annihilation. Later, as these camps were overrun by the Soviet Army, prisoners were crammed into Buchenwald, some 13,000 of whom died during three months in 1945 alone. The total death toll at Buchenwald may never be known, but it was at least 51,000.
The camp was liberated by the U.S. Army on 11 April 1945, when the American soldiers found that the inmates had already taken the camp over after most of the SS guards fled, and were organizing its surrender. Buchenwald was one of the first glimpses that Americans had of the horrors of the concentration camp system. After the war the Soviets used Buchenwald as a "Special Camp" for German and other political prisoners, some 7100 of whom died there from 1945-1950.
http://www.thirdreichruins.com/buchenwald.htmhttp://isurvived.org/AUSCHWITZ_TheCamp.htmlAuschwitz, located in Oswiecim outside of Cracow, Poland, has become a symbol of the Holocaust. One of the main reasons that Nazi Germany established the camp there was because it was a central intersection of roads and railways. Before the Second World War, Jews living in Oswiecim, who were often artisans or merchants, constituted approximately half of this small town's population. After the Holocaust, it may be argued that Oswiecim will forever be overshadowed by Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers.