Thirty years ago, Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney between 1975 and 2009, and 19-year-old Alvin Bragg, the current occupant of this powerful office, were zealous champions of the notorious documentary "Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II," which falsely claimed African American GIs liberated Buchenwald and Dachau.
Broadcast nationwide on PBS's "The American Experience" on Veterans Day in November 1992, "Liberators" was directed by Nina Rosenblum and William Miles, narrated by Denzel Washington and Lou Gossett Jr., and introduced by Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer David McCullough.
On December 17, 1992, four prominent Democrats – Morgenthau, New York City Mayor David Dinkins, congressman Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson — hosted a screening of "Liberators" at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem, before an audience of 1,200 Jewish and Black New Yorkers.
Other attendees were Al Sharpton; investment banker Felix Rohatyn; philanthropist and Jewish community leader Peggy Tishman; feminist writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X.
Elie Wiesel, the founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and Buchenwald survivor, sent a videotaped message of support to the Apollo audience, and to New Yorkers watching the evening's events on WNET, PBS's flagship in NYC and the film's primary financial supporter.
In reality, this unprecedented fiasco in Black-Jewish relations was a thinly-disguised campaign rally for the increasingly unpopular, incompetent Mayor Dinkins, who was facing a difficult rematch in November 1993 with Republican Rudy Giuliani. (Fortunately for the city's future, Giuliani won in a squeaker, and was overwhelmingly reelected in 1997.)
On February 8, 1993, Harvard University held a sold-out screening of the faux "Liberators," which was initiated by Jesse Jackson, and sponsored by the university's president Neil Rudenstine, Dean of Students Archie Epps III, and the Afro-American Studies Department, according to a February 4, 1993, article in The Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate newspaper.
Harvard sophomore Alvin Bragg, the current embattled, highly-partisan Manhattan district attorney, was chosen as one of the two students to participate in a panel discussion after the screening. Bragg, vice president of Harvard's Black Students Association, was quoted in a Crimson article the next day:
"I know a lot of people who are scrambling around now trying to go. I have no measure [for the accuracy, so] I'm looking forward to seeing it."
A few days earlier, The New Republic published Jeffrey Goldberg's article, "The Exaggerators," which definitively debunked the film's claims that Black American GIs helped liberate Buchenwald and Dachau.
Significantly, while the Feb. 4 Crimson article included irrefutable evidence from Goldberg's pivotal article, Harvard's leadership went ahead with the screening.
But mere days later, on Feb. 11, 1993, WNET finally pulled the plug on "Liberators," and commissioned an independent investigation by Morton Silverstein, a respected documentarian, of the film.
During the previous three months, veterans of the U.S. Army divisions that truly liberated Buchenwald (Sixth Armored and 80th Infantry), and Dachau (45th and 42nd Infantry), had been vehemently protesting against the film's falsehoods.
Their righteous protests were supported by the superb reporting of a small group of honest journalists in NYC, the media capital of America, including Chris Ruddy, then the publisher of New York Guardian and currently CEO of Newsmax; Eric Breindel, the editorial page editor of the New York Post; Arnold Fine of The Jewish Press; and Jeffrey Goldberg, then writing for Jewish Forward and now editor of The Atlantic.
Since my late father, Barney Schulte, was a genuine liberator of Buchenwald, I had joined the "anti-Liberators" camp in early December 1992, and my first of many articles on this monumental scandal was published in the New York Jewish Week in mid-February 1993.
In September 1993, Silverstein's report was released to nationwide press coverage, and it revealed that the African American soldiers of the 761st Tank and 183rd Combat Engineers battalions did not participate in the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau.
When Bragg graduated from Harvard in June 1995, The Crimson published a long obsequious portrait of Bragg, "The Anointed One," which suppressed his unsavory role in the university's "Liberators" scandal:
"Bragg worked cooperatively with Harvard administrators, serving as a speaker for an Epps-engineered showing of a film on Black 'Liberators' who freed Jews from concentration camps."
The 49-year-old Bragg was born, reared and still lives in Harlem, and the former neighborhood congressman, Rangel, of "Liberators" infamy, endorsed Bragg in the 2021 district attorney's race.
In March 2010, congressman Rangel resigned as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, when faced with a slew of news reports about his personal financial irregularities.
In 1990, Mayor Dinkins was investigated for a stock transfer to his son.
But neither powerful Democrat was indicted by state or federal prosecutors. Conversely, former Republican President Donald Trump was recently indicted by Bragg, on the flimsiest evidence, for 34 felonies.
Thirty years ago, I learned what a dystopian Democratic "banana republic" New York City was. In 2023, tens of millions of my fellow Americans have recognized this horrific reality.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.
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