During World War II, Payne served as a member of the U.S. Army's 89th Infantry Division[1][2] that liberated Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

[6][7] During the 2008 presidential election, there was brief media attention when Obama mistakenly identified the camp he helped liberate as Auschwitz instead of Ohrdruf.

[8] In 2009, Payne spoke about this experience: Ohrdruf was in that string of towns going across, south of Gotha and Erfurt.

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.

[10] At the university, he shared a dormitory and developed a longtime friendship with Lien Chan, the future vice president and premier of Taiwan.