Obama admits he mistakenly claimed his uncle helped to liberate Jews

Barack Obama was thrown on to the defensive last night after wrongly claiming his uncle was involved in the liberation of Auschwitz.

The Democrat frontrunner faced a barrage of abuse from Republicans, who pointed out that it was the Russian army that discovered the Nazi death camp in January 1945.

His critics toned down their attacks when it turned out that, rather than making up the story, the Illinois senator simply got his camps mixed up.

His great uncle had actually helped liberate a lesser-known camp in Germany.

But the blunder left him open to accusations of historical ignorance on a particularly sensitive subject.

Mr Obama had told a group of veterans at a Memorial Day event to salute America's war dead: 'I had an uncle who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps.

'And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn't leave the house for six months.'

His aides swiftly insisted that Mr Obama's great uncle Charlie Payne had helped liberate a concentration camp as part of the 89th Infantry Division, but it was Buchenwald and not Auschwitz.

Owning up to the blunder, his campaign spokesman Bill Burton admitted: 'He mistakenly referred to Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald in telling of his personal experience of a soldier in his family who served heroically.'

In fact, Mr Obama's relative helped free inmates detained at Germany's Ohrdruf forced labour camp, a satellite of Buchenwald where the Nazis were building a huge underground bunker for Hitler and his henchmen.

American soldiers discovered horrific scenes when the camp was liberated on April 4, 1945.

Emaciated survivors told of starvation, cruelty and bestiality. But it was two months earlier that Stalin's Red Army stumbled on the horrors of Auschwitz in Poland, where more than a million Jews were killed in gas chambers.

Horror: Child victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp

Political observers said it was unthinkable that Mr Obama  -  who has been heavily criticised by Republican rival John McCain for his lack of military service  -  would have deliberately mentioned Auschwitz as a ploy to invoke the maximum emotion in his speech.

But the row highlighted just how careful candidates must be as their every move comes under the microscope in the Democratic nomination race and the subsequent run-up to November's presidential election.

Hillary Clinton, 60, is still grappling with the fallout from her remarks last Friday when she referred to the June 1968 assassination of White House candidate Bobby Kennedy as a reason why she was determined to fight on at least until all the Democrat primaries are over next Tuesday.

Still needing 45 delegates to clinch the nomination, Mr Obama, 46, has already turned his attention to his likely Republican opponent Mr McCain, 71.

He wasted no time in linking George Bush and his would-be Republican successor yesterday after the two men appeared briefly together in public for the first time in nearly three months at a private fundraiser.

'No cameras. No reporters. And we all know why,' he said.

'Senator McCain doesn't want to be seen, cap-in-hand, with the president whose failed policies he promises to continue for another four years.'

Even Mr McCain's allies privately fret that the unpopular president could be a burden.