During speeches at Buchenwald in June 2009 neither President Obama nor Elie Wiesel identified the American liberators from the Sixth Armored and 80th Infantry divisions, nor remembered the 28,000 casualties they incurred in the brutal fighting between Normandy in July 1944 and Germany or Austria in the spring of 1945. (The 80th Infantry also liberated Ebensee, another Mauthausen subcamp.)
It was left to German Chancellor Andrea Merkel, who lived her first 36 years in East Germany, to speak of the “sacrifice made in blood of the United States of America” in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
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In April 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder was the featured speaker at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council’s annual dinner, which was honoring American liberators on the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany and Austria.
Holder, however, singled out only Leon Bass, misidentifying him as a Buchenwald liberator. Bass, First Lady Michelle Obama and Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, another Obama mentor, have been active in an organization called Facing History and Ourselves, an organization headquartered in a Boston suburb whose website currently sells DVDs of “Liberators.”
Liberal power brokers in the Boston metropolitan area, like their counterparts in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, have been leading disseminators of the African-American liberators myth. On February 8, 1993, three days before WNET pulled the plug on “Liberators,” Harvard hosted an on-campus screening initiated by Jesse Jackson and supported by the university’s president Neil Rudenstine, the Afro-American Studies Department and chairman Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree (another Obama mentor).
Despite the publication of two articles in the student-run Harvard Crimson citing Jeffrey Goldberg’s pivotal New Republic article (“The Exaggerators”), which provided definitive evidence the film blatantly lied about the participation of black GIs in the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, Harvard foolishly went ahead with the event.
While Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and was not present at this screening, he and the university’s 1993 brain trust never heeded the sagacious advice of the late former Harvard professor and senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said that intellectuals are entitled to their own interpretations but not their own facts.
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In a Forward opinion piece in October 2011, “How FDR Helped Save Jews of the Holy Land,” Robert Morgenthau, of “Liberators”/Apollo Theater infamy, and Frank Tuerkheimer ludicrously claimed that President Roosevelt was the “one man more than any other” responsible for rescuing “500,000 Jews in Africa and Asia” from Hitler’s genocidal plans.
In fact, 1.5 million Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa during World War II, including nearly 500,000 in Palestine. Between April and September 1941, before America’s entry into the war in December, British Commonwealth and Empire forces, deployed by Winston Churchill, vanquished the Germans, Vichy French and their local allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.
Curiously, Morgenthau and Tuerkheimer, former United States attorneys appointed by Democratic presidents, didn’t mention Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, which sealed the defeat of the Germans and Italians in North Africa and rescued 600,000 Sephardic Jews.
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In February 2012, Elie Wiesel joined with liberal media outlets including The Washington Post and MSNBC to attack Mitt Romney, who was surging in the Republican presidential primaries, for not denouncing the Mormon Church’s despicable practice of baptizing deceased Jews, including victims of the Holocaust.
Wiesel, however, has chosen not to publicly lambaste another prominent Mormon politician, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, on similar grounds.
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Eric Holder, in a speech in February 2009, less than a month into the Obama presidency, provoked a national outcry by calling Americans a “nation of cowards” for allegedly not engaging in candid dialogues about race and not seriously studying African-American history. But with the attorney general’s efforts in propagating the discredited myth of the black liberators of Buchenwald, and Obama’s disgraceful failure to honor the genuine liberators during his June 2009 visit to the former concentration camp, it is the Obama administration that is dispensing the same racial wine that was already rancid nearly three decades ago.
