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761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three
men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
'It's totally inaccurate.
The men couldn't have been
where they say they were
because the camp was 60
miles away from where we
were on the day of liberation'
Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association
with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of
the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.
"You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with
shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic
fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so
disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the
battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two
sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C
Company.
Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated
Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free
either camp.
"It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who
commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were
because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of
liberation."
Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's
account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the
761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across
Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not
claim to have liberated those camps," he says.
Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion
book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by
blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has
conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in
the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black
soldiers.
One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed
that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.
I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"
says the survivor.
Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust
revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says
the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone
interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community.
How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely
incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most
Jewish people think, I can't understand it."
She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what
kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first
place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation.
People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says
it stands by the film's veracity.
The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems
all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among
other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of
Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and
its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary.
The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on
the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own
Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president
Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an
achievement of the unit.
"It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not
compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the
761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat
performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it
blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt."
Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion,
which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The
unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its
liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof
of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never
contacted him to discuss the unit's history.
Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls
himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the
Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the
camp. "I don't know whether we were first or second ... We didn't go in with
guns blazing," he recalls. "There was just a handful of us. I was only there
for two or three hours. The rest of the company came later."
The Liberators, fuelled by the public-relations success at the Apollo, is
gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los
Angeles in March. Ms. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with
co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish
Committee.
Copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New York City junior
and senior high schools, according to board spokeswoman Linda Scott. The cost
of the schools project, Mr. Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth
Rohatyn, the wife of investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the
Apollo showing, although Ms. Scott says that several philanthropists are vying
for the honour of buying the tapes for the schools.
According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at school-board
headquarters, the film will be used to "examine the effects of racism on
African-American soldiers and on Jews who were in concentration camps ... to
explain the role of African-American soldiers in liberating Jews from Nazi
concentration camps and to reveal the involvement of Jews as 'soldiers' in the
civil-rights movement."
The documentary continues to be supported by a number of influential Jews.
PR guru Howard Rubenstein, who is a vice-president of New York's Jewish
Community Relations Council (and who also flacks for radio station WLIB, known
for the anti-Semitic invective it regularly airs), worked pro bono on the
Apollo event and continues to plug the documentary, despite having heard that
it is misleading.
"I have no reason to distrust Nina [Rosenblum]," he says. "She seemed very
able and honest. I hope and pray it's accurate."
Peggy Tishman, a former president of the JCRC and a co-host of the evening
at the Apollo, is sticking by the documentary too. Ms. Tishman says the
documentary is "good for the Holocaust."
"Why would anybody want to exploit the idea that this is a fraud?" she
says. "What we're trying to do is make New York a better place for you and me
to live."
She claims that the accuracy of the film is not the issue. What is
important is the way it can bring Jews and blacks into "dialogue." There are a
lot of truths that are very necessary," she says. "This is not a truth that's
necessary."
Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward.
The above Jeffrey Goldberg article was accompanied by two photographs, the
captions of which were:
U.S. soldiers, both high-ranking officers and
enlisted men, view a scene of horror at a death
camp. Concentration-camp prisoners were murdered
as a last act by departing German guards.
A black U.S. soldier guards German prisoners in
France during the last weeks of the war.
Comments on the above
Jeffrey Goldberg article
Where's the harm? The Liberators incident is relevant to several of the
topics discussed in the Ukrainian Archive. The Liberators has been somewhat
arbitrarily placed with 60 Minutes documents because it demonstrates the power
of the media to fabricate history. In the case of the 23 Oct 1994 60 Minutes
broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, the disinformation served to calumniate
Ukrainians; in the case of the PBS documentary, the Liberators, the
disinformation appears to be oriented toward improving relations between Jews
and blacks. Thus, whereas the 60 Minutes disinformation will readily be viewed
as destructive by all who learn of it, the Liberators disinformation may be
viewed by some as innocuous or even benevolent.
However, there are reasons for not viewing the Liberators disinformation
leniently or indulgently:
(1) Black grievances against Jews may be founded on genuine exploitation of
Blacks by Jews, and the Liberators may be an attempt to quiet opposition to
that exploitation and so allow it to continue.
(2) Setting the precedent of conniving at disinformation such as that offered
in the Liberators offers disseminators of disinformation the prospect of
impunity for manipulating public opinion to their own ends, and these ends vary
on the benevolence-malevolence continuum. Whereas inducing people who had
never been at Buchenwald to simulate returning to Buchenwald for PBS cameras
may seem harmless, the buildup of tolerance for such chicanery makes it easier
to similarly induce people to falsely testify in war crimes proceedings
concerning Holocaust events, with the result that the lives of innocent accused
are disrupted, shattered, and even lost.
"Capturing" and "liberating"? Referring to Allied forces "capturing" or
"liberating" the camps is inflating what really happened - which is that Allied
soldiers peacefully walked into camps that German forces had abandoned days
previously. In the words of Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans'
organization, "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp."
In other words, the Liberators film leaves the impression of Jews attempting to
get black fighting units to falsely take credit for non-accomplishments.
Unreliability of eye-witness testimony. We have already had occasion to notice on
the Ukrainian Archive the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, as in the
cases of falsely accused Frank Walus and John Demjanjuk. The Liberators film
reminds us once again how easy it is to get some old men to say whatever you
want them to. Thus, we find that "two of the company's soldiers assert in the
film that they liberated Dachau," when we know that this could not have been
the case, and we find that "several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film
and in the companion book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they
were liberated by blacks of these units," again when this is an impossibility.
Of course upon less biased questioning, some of these old men will recant: "But
Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has conducted extensive research on
the film, says two of the survivors featured in the Liberators told him they
were no longer sure when they first saw black soldiers."
Responsible Jews and non-Jews oppose irresponsible Jews. It cannot escape
our attention that foremost among those challenging the disinformation in the
Liberators are the apparently-Jewish writer Jeffrey Goldberg, and
possibly-Jewish historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This
reinforces a point introduced earlier in the Ukrainian Archive during the
discussion of Warsaw's 1905 Alphonsenpogrom, to the effect that what may be
taken at first glance to be an expression of antagonism toward Jews may in
reality be an expression of opposition by responsible Jews and non-Jews alike
against irresponsible elements among Jews, and that it is the responsible Jews
themselves who may be in the vanguard of the attack against irresponsible Jews.
We have seen this to be the case repeatedly, not only during Warsaw's
Alphonsenpogrom, but in many prominent incidents - for example, Israeli defense
attorney Yoram Sheftel must be given a large share of the credit for exposing
the duplicity and incompetence of the Israeli justice system, and thereby
saving the life of John Demjanjuk, a case in which other Jews such as Phoenix
attorney William J. Wolf also played leading and heroic roles. The prominent
role played by responsible Jews in opposing irresponsible Jews should not be
surprising - the irresponsible Jews injure all Jews because their
irresponsibility attaches in popular thinking to Jews generally, and thus
serves to smear the good name of all Jews.
Important to note in the Liberators case, then, is that the friction does not
divide cleanly along ethnic lines. The Liberators, and the many other cases
before us, do not illustrate Jews clashing with anti-Semites - rather, they
illustrate the irresponsible clashing with the responsible, the disseminators
of disinformation clashing with the upholders of truth.
Zero repercussions. And so for having told the lies that are told on the
Liberators, have any of the makers of that film suffered any repercussions?
Have any of them been fired? Been demoted? Been censured? Have any of them
suffered a loss of face? Do any of them find that their later work is rejected
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