I really had an uncle (maybe a great uncle) who liberated a German concentration camp. What most of you don't know is that there were at least a hundred small camps scattered around Germany, most had an oven or two, all had sadistic guards, and all had Jews, Gypsies, and undesirables. He told all of us (at a Thanksgiving dinner) the camp liberation story. He was in the 82nd Airborne and they had fought all across Europe, killed hundreds of thousands of Germans, shot more than a hundred prisoners, and by the time they got to Germany they had no feelings for anyone. The way he told it, "a soldier from another unit came running toward us motioning with his arms and yelling hysterically for us to hurry up, and be prepared for what you see." The area in general smelled like decaying bodies, a smell that got stronger as they moved to the hill. Just over the little hill was a camp, loaded with skeletal naked corpses and living skeletons who couldn't even talk. The soldiers knocked down the fence and started tossing their K-rations to the skeletons and screaming over the radio to send medics. His personal reaction was to fall on his knees and just scream and scream and scream. He did not feel good about liberating the inhabitants but he felt sort of good about turning the disarmed guards over to the camp survivors to beat to death. The prisoners jumped on the guards by the hundreds and beat the screaming bastards to death. My uncle became an alcoholic and didn't get into AA til around 1952 or so and he never knew whether the "liberation" of the camp was the cause of his psychological collapse or just the war in general. He never told this story again that I know of. When I was in the Navy I heard similar stories about liberating the Japanese prisoner of war camps and freeing GIs who had been starved and beaten for four years. I think any of us suddenly confronted with thousands of deliberately starved people would go nuts, temporarily at least.
Many of us criticized the German citizenry for doing "nothing" while these camps were right in their midst, the horrid odor of death constantly enveloping them while they just went about their business every day like nothing was going on. What those of us lazing on the beaches of SoCal or skiing in the Rockies missed was the Nazi practice of killing "kith and kin" of anyone who didn't "go along." This meant that not only were wives of traitors shot (if they were lucky) but every relative from child through uncles on both sides of the family tree was dragged off and killed, sometimes after rape and torture. The price of challenging the Nazis was the deaths of your children, parents, and uncles.
What would you have done, or not done?
Obama is telling us who he is. You cannot say "I made a mistake it was somebody else who liberated a camp", and think for a moment any of us will believe him. He's shit.
