Barack Obama is a history buff. When he makes a political point he instinctively reaches for the historical parallel: the Lincolnesque “team of rivals” making up his Cabinet, Winston Churchill’s attitude to torture or his own family’s experience of the Second World War.

The only problem is that he sometimes gets history wrong.

His plan to visit Buchenwald is in part a tribute to his great-uncle, Charlie Payne, who participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a satellite camp.

Last May, however, Mr Obama said that his uncle “was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz”. Republicans pointed out that it was the Soviets who liberated Auschwitz.

Times Archive, 1945: The horrors of Buchenwald

A policy of steady starvation and inhuman brutality marked the lowest point of degradation to which humanity had descended

• Archive Topic: Concentration Camps

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“Unless his uncle was serving in the Red Army, there’s no way Obama’s statement can be true,” a Republican spokesman said.

The Democratic candidate issued a correction, but critical historians have found earlier examples of Mr Obama’s elastic approach to the facts. In 2002 he cited the wartime experiences of his grandfather, Stanley Dunham. “My grandfather . . . heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.”

Treblinka, like Auschwitz, is in Poland, and was also liberated by Soviet troops.

Last week Mr Obama extrapolated from another historical example — the prohibition of torture in wartime Britain — to conclude: “Churchill said ‘We don’t torture’ when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.” Historians pounced again, with a flurry of blog postings pointing out that there was no record of Churchill explicitly banning torture.

Mr Obama will come to Europe next month, in search of history, to mark the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings. But as he has discovered, history is a double-edged sword.

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