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
