Charles T. Payne

Who is Charles T. Payne?

Charles Thomas Payne is an American who served in the U.S. military during World War II as a member of the U.S. Army's 89th Infantry Division that liberated Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was 20 years old at the time. He is Barack Obama's great uncle and has been mentioned in Obama's speeches including the one given in 2009 commemorating the anniversary of D-Day.

Obama has often described Payne's role in liberating Ohrdruf forced labor camp. There was brief media attention when Obama mistakenly identified the camp as Auschwitz during the campaign. In 2009, Payne spoke about this experiences:

"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 against 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."

Payne appeared in the visitor's gallery at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, when his great-nephew was nominated for President. He was the assistant director of the University of Chicago's Library.