Archive/File: orgs/american/oregon/banished.cpu liberators

From oneb!cs.ubc.ca!destroyer!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!wupost!uunet!techbook.com!techbook.com!not-for-mail Mon May 17 13:17:50 PDT 1993
Article: 2324 of alt.revisionism
Xref: oneb soc.history:11701 alt.censorship:9906 alt.activism:20955 alt.revisionism:2324
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From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.censorship,alt.activism,alt.revisionism
Subject: Very revealing article about Holocaust lies and "anti-Racism"
Date: 17 May 1993 03:18:11 -0700
Organization: TECHbooks - Public Access
Lines: 188
Message-ID: <1t7op3$q7s@techbook.techbook.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: techbook.techbook.com
Keywords: From the very Zionist publication, _The New Republic_


___________________________________________________________________________

Description:

_New Republic_ article detailing the LIES in the PBS 'Liberators' special,
which showed a Black tank battalion 'liberating' Buchenwald.  The unique
thing about it is that the _New Republic_ is very Zionist.
___________________________________________________________________________


     If you read the following article (which is very revealing in SEVERAL
respects,) you will learn the UTTER HYPOCRISY of the mainstream Jewish
"anti-racist" platform -- you will learn, from the mouth of a frantic
"anti-Revisionist," "anti-Racist" Jew that:


          There is 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.  [Emphasis added.]


     Here is the complete article:



02/08/93 Black soldiers and Buchenwald. THE EXAGGERATORS By Jeffrey Goldberg


It was a rare moment: the Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired
Holocaust survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi on the
stage of the Apollo Theater. The occasion was last month's black-Jewish
celebration of the "Liberators," the pbs documentary about all-black Army
units that, according to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau.
The sponsors of the screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and
influential New Yorkers, billed the film as an important tool in the
rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.

But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night
Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the
transgression of consorting with Jackson. More significantly, the film's
backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most
prominently in the "Liberators" had no hand in the capture of either Dachau
or Buchenwald. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when they were
liberated," says E.G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st Tank
Battalion, who says he cooperated with the filmmakers until he came to
believe that they were faking material.

McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
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.
McConnell says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with pbs, not the
761st."

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 that McConnell can't be
trusted. "You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit in the
head with shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." McConnell, a retired
mechanic for twa, laughs when told of Rosenblum's statement. "If I was so
disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.

McConnell's 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. A statement issued by historians at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum also states that 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 sixty
miles away from where we were on the day [of liberation]."

Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Gates's
account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
near either one of [the camps]," Bates says. According to Bates, tanks of
the 761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path
across Germany was sixty to 100 miles 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 that 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 Jackson at
the Apollo confirmed that he too was unsure of what had happened at
Buchenwald. "It's hard to say now. I know there were black soldiers in the
camp, but I don't know when exactly," says the survivor.

Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust revisionists
and racists. "These people are [of] the same mentality that says that 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
thirty-three 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 film's 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, 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 the Germans and against discrimination in its own
Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by 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, the president
of the 761st's 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 then commander, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after
its liberation, when General Patton ordered units in the sector to see
proof of German atrocities. Fuller says that 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 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," Bass 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," fueled by the public relations success at the Apollo, is
gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los
Angeles in March. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with
co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish
Committee. And copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New
York City junior and senior high schools, according to the school board
president's spokeswoman, Linda Scott. The cost of the schools project,
Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth Rohatyn, the wife of Felix
Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the Apollo showing, although Scott says that
several philanthropists are vying for the honor of buying the tapes for the
schools. According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at the
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.
The p.r. 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," 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. Tishman, who was
introduced at the Apollo by Representative Charles Rangel--who called her
"Peggy Tisch"--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," Tishman says. "This is
not a truth that's necessary."


Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward.



Transmitted:  93-01-21 10:51:27 EST

-----

-Dan Gannon

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