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D:\WRITING\ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND REVIEWS\NEW YORK NEWSDAY\LOU POTTER, WILLIAM
MILES, NINA ROSENBLUM - LIBERATORS - FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS IN WORLD WAR II -
NEWSDAY.DOCX
08:15 Page 1 of 4 17 August 2020
Black Liberators From Nazi Turmoil
By Kevin Brown. Kevin Brown is the author of the forthcoming biography Romare Bearden.
He is currently at work on a life of Countee Cullen.
LIBERATORS: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, by Lou Potter with
William Miles and Nina Rosenblum. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 303 pp., $29.95.
Liberators, the companion volume to the American Experience documentary
broadcast recently on PBS, is a moving history of African-Americans in the Armed Forces
and their role in liberating Nazi concentration camps. In collaboration with documentary
filmmakers William Miles and Nina Rosenblum, Emmy Award-winning
producer/screenwriter Lou Potter has combined firsthand accounts of both veterans and
survivors.
“Liberators” pays tribute both to hitherto unsung black fighters for freedom and to
the salvation of “one despised and rejected people by another.” Although the book lacks
elegance and cohesion, this is more than offset by its wealth of information and the strength
of its story. Separate and unequal, the Armed Forces reflected American society at large
during World War II. The 761st, the first African-American Tank Battalion, trained in Texas
and Louisiana. Unacquainted with Jim Crow - apartheid, American style - “Tan Yankees”
from New York, Chicago and Philadelphia trained in the very region from which their
families had fled.
The “Black Panthers,” whose nickname derived from their logo, were a proud, elite
unit. It was at Camp Hood, Texas, that the 761st came to the attention of Gen. George S.
D:\WRITING\ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND REVIEWS\NEW YORK NEWSDAY\LOU POTTER, WILLIAM
MILES, NINA ROSENBLUM - LIBERATORS - FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS IN WORLD WAR II -
NEWSDAY.DOCX
08:15 Page 2 of 4 17 August 2020
Patton. But his was no affirmative-action program; Patton chose these men not because they
were black but because they were the best.
Handpicked for its nerve and intelligence, the 761st was acutely conscious of the
irony of “fighting on two fronts”: Overseas, they would be asked perhaps to pay the ultimate
price - their lives - for making the world safe to enjoy freedoms that they were denied at
home. Nevertheless, they realized that bad as things were, they could only be worse under
Hitler. Thus they saw the war as an opportunity both to do some serious damage to the
enemy abroad and to win some respect at home. In 1944, Patton sent them to Europe.
Having survived nearly three years’ training down South, the Panthers were a match for
Hitler’s overextended army. Sailing in the hold of a segregated troop ship packed almost as
tightly as the slavers that brought their ancestors from Africa in chains, the 761st recrossed
the ocean - this time as liberators.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, they hit Omaha Beach. During six months of brutal and
continuous combat, Patton’s Panthers fought their way from France to Germany, helped
make history at the Battle of the Bulge and broke through the Seigfried Line. Even the
Germans were in awe of these “Tan tankers.”
Potter parallels the odyssey of the 761st with that of Ben Bender, a Polish Jew who
was kept alive by hope. His parents, rather than face capture by the Nazis, committed
suicide. In 1940, Bender was imprisoned at Buchenwald, where “one day . . . was a lifetime.”
One thousand seven hundred inmates were crammed into barracks designed to hold 400.
They lived with constant cold, terror and hallucinatory hunger. Their ration was a slice of
D:\WRITING\ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND REVIEWS\NEW YORK NEWSDAY\LOU POTTER, WILLIAM
MILES, NINA ROSENBLUM - LIBERATORS - FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS IN WORLD WAR II -
NEWSDAY.DOCX
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bread, a bowl of watery soup and occasional garbage scraps. Daily, they watched as others
were shot or tortured to death, and underwent mad, “scientific experiments.”
Spearheading Patton’s Third Army, the Black Panthers liberated Buchenwald in the
spring of 1945. Many of the survivors had never seen black faces before. Bender recalls these
battle-hardened troops “crying like babies, carrying the emaciated bodies of the liberated.”
Next, just outside Munich, they stormed Dachau. There, these liberators looked upon the
very face of evil. They encountered furnaces filled with burned victims. Not even the most
savage lynch party could have prepared them for what they witnessed. “I’d been used to
death and killing,” recalls one of the soldiers. “That was something you were trained for.
You weren’t trained for this.” Here was racism carried to its logical conclusion.
The liberated learned that life and freedom could come from within the iron wombs
of tanks, at the hands of soot-faced soldiers. To the liberators, themselves survivors of
systematic bigotry, the moral was likewise clear. Buchenwald was a mile outside Weimar -
home of Goethe, Schiller and Bach, and the heart of German high culture and democracy:
“If this could happen here, it could happen anywhere.” The current climate of “tribal”
hatred - right-wing extremism resurgent in Germany and elsewhere, “ethnic cleasing” in the
former Yugoslavia, religious fratricide in India and often murderous racism in this country -
suggests that it could happen again. But one surviving liberator was optimistic: “Things are
changing . . . I feel the lives lost out there were not in vain.” Survivors all, the liberators and
the liberated in this book are exemplars of uncommon heroism and common humanity.
D:\WRITING\ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND REVIEWS\NEW YORK NEWSDAY\LOU POTTER, WILLIAM
MILES, NINA ROSENBLUM - LIBERATORS - FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS IN WORLD WAR II -
NEWSDAY.DOCX
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ART/GRAPHICS: Photo by National Archives-A black soldier and his German
captive, from “The Liberators”
1992-12-21 - NEWSDAY – Page 40