The story of Buchenwald also involves lessons about our own country.
Black GIs at Buchenwald seeing the dead. … these corpses were of inmates who had died of starvation and disease.. The Nazi stripped the uniforms off of officially exterminated prisoners. I can not imagine the horror my Dad faced erying to heal the inmates!
My father was there in part because he led a largely Jewish medical company … at that time Jewish doctors was less than popular with the white troops so Eisenhower created a Jewish medical company that could roam where it was needed. When the company reached Buchenwald, the invading allies included a lot of other “kinds of Americans” .. including African Americans.
Germany provided a lesson about intolerance. Benjamin Bender, a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald. wrote to the NY Times, “The recollections are still vivid — ” Mr. Bender wrote of his liberators, “black soldiers of the Third Army, tall and strong, crying like babies, carrying the emaciated bodies of the liberated prisoners.” One of those soldiers helping liberate Mr. Bender was Leon Bass then a 20-year-old from Philadelphia. After getting orders to go to Buchenwald, Mr. Bass asked his lieutenant: “Where are we going? He looked at me, and said ‘we’re going to a concentration camp.’ Now, I was really perplexed and puzzled because I didn’t know a thing about concentration camps. In all the training they had given me, no one had ever mentioned concentration camps. But on this day in April in 1945, I was to have the shock of my life.” In the camps Bass saw Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, Gays and trade unionists, all denigrated, to use a now dubious term, by the German supermen. The lesson for the Black GI was a bitter one when he returned to the segregated US.
Another African American soldier from WWII told a similar story to his nephew, BTX3 a liberal blogger: “at which point he told me about entering the camp at Buchenwald, and what he saw while the bodies were still lying in piles on the ground… About the trail of bodies on the side of the road in ditches killed as the Nazis tried to escape.” This was a hard story to tell because , as the blogger writes, “Before WWII there were about 100,000 black and mixed race people in Europe – 24,000 in Germany alone. The Nazis forceably sterilized the black Germans. Those captured in occupied countries were sent to concentration camps where they were worked to death, gassed, or used in medical “experiments”. Only a few thousand survived.”
A film abut the liberation was made in he 1990s by William Miles, a documentarian working for PBS. The film falsely described the African Americans as being the first liberators of the camp. . The film, produced and directed by Mr. Miles and Nina Rosenblum, was nominated for an Academy Award, but its accuracy was subsequently questioned because these soldiers were not among the first to enter the camp. The unit cited in the film, the 761st Tank Battalion, part of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army, was present at the liberation of the Gunskirchen camp in Austria and not Buchenwald. Nina Rosenblum admitted the error but went on to ask “Who liberated Benjamin Bender at Buchenwald?”
Perhaps my Dad’s pictures could help answer that question … we may never know as the images are decaying in that lawyer’s office in Boston. On the other hand, maybe it is better to not ask the question “who liberated Buchenwald?” Maybe it is better to remember that the lessons about racism are not about the liberators but about the sacrifices of all the soldiers who fought against the Nazi horror. Jewish liberator, Black liberator .. why should it matter?