disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
His 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. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
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