This is in a completely different category than Hillary's dodging bullets on the tarmac. I can easily see it happening when you make a lot of speeches, and you want to make a point about treatment of veterans (which is what the speech was about), and you have a great-uncle that you never knew well but have been told stories about, and you know that great-uncle liberated a Nazi concentration camp and suffered PTSD afterwards, and you're not that familiar in detail with the military history of WWII, what's the first Nazi camp that comes to anyone's mind? Auschwitz, of course. Oops!

Being a history buff myself, as is Imperator, I immediately saw the mistake -- very, very unlikely Obama had a great-uncle in the Red Army -- but it's not that big a deal, except to incorrigible nit-pickers like us. Certainly there's no reason to believe he made the story up, and that would be the only thing to get significantly upset about.

Incidentally, while it's true as Frank says that Buchenwald and Auschwitz served different purposes, the experience of liberating one would be similar to liberating the other. The main differences were that Auschwitz was bigger, and that it included the gas chambers and crematoria where Jews were mass-murdered. But troops liberating the camp would not have seen that happening, they would instead have encountered lots of emaciated prisoners who were being worked to death. (Since Auschwitz wasn't just a death camp, it was also a labor camp; Jewish arrivals were separated into two groups, one put to death in the gas chambers, the other housed in the barracks and put to work.) Ghastly, but the same would have been seen at Buchenwald, too. So there's every reason to believe Obama's story was accurate, except for the goof about the name of the camp.