By Jerry Klinger
BOYNTON BEACH, Florida — For most, Memorial Day is another day off. Another excuse not to go to work and grill hamburgers, or go to the beach and kvetch about politics and the decline of American society.
However, Memorial Day is really a day to stop and assess the meaning of what we have and who gave it to us. Freedom, life, the ability to complain would never have been without those who served and sacrificed for us all.
For the first time in 75 years, a remarkable effort is being led by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation to honor the American liberators of the notorious Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany. It has never been done for a variety of political, and neglectful reasons.
An American Liberators’ Memorial is being proposed to the Buchenwald Foundation. The memorial is to be placed and dedicated by the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Camp, April 11, 2020.
The first heavy rumblings of the American tanks approaching Mt. Ettersberg, on whose backside the notorious Nazi Concentration Camp of Buchenwald was built, were easily heard by the S.S. guards at 11:00 am April 11, 1945. Between 1,200 and 1,500 S.S. guarded the camp from outside. The Communists were their prisoner trustees running the camp from the inside.
The S.S. guards deserted their posts like the frightened rats they always were. Some donned prisoner uniforms as disguises, others dressed in women’s clothing. Except for a few scores, they simply ran. The Communist prisoner trustees “rose in revolt” barely minutes before the first American units arrived.
The American soldiers expected heavy fighting to continue. A few advanced into the Camp, confused, horrified, even frightened by the incomprehensible nightmare they encountered.
Buchenwald was liberated.
It would be a few more days before the Americans fully controlled the Camp, replacing the Communists. The last to be liberated were the Jews in the swampy filth hole at the bottom of the mountain, a separate site the Germans called the “Das Kleine Lager,” the “Little Camp.”
Political expediency turned Thuringia, the German State where Buchenwald is located, over to the newly established East German Government under Russian Communist oversight. The liberation narrative changed from the Americans as liberators to the Communists alone as liberators.
The East Germans put Buchenwald to active use as a camp for the people they did not like. Many more died there.
Today, after the reunification of Germany, Buchenwald is an educational Memorial to the horrors of National Socialism, Nazism. The Jewish story is a central part of the narrative, with a memorial having been built in 2002 in the “Little Camp” by the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad with significant help from the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. But no memorial was built for the American liberators.
The only memorial in Buchenwald is to seven American flyers who died in the Camp during the Nazi period.
There are 44 memorials near Buchenwald to Russians. Nothing for the liberators of Buchenwald, Thuringia and all of Germany for the actual liberators – the Americans.
JASHP reached out to and received political supporting letters from Senators, Congressman, the VFW, the American Ambassador, and from Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower who was the overall commander of the American armies in Europe. We wrote to and received a letter of support from Chancellor Merkel of Germany.
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell wrote: “The horrors that took place at Buchenwald during World War II must never be forgotten. Nor should the heroism of the men who liberated the prisoners there on April 11, 1945.”
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said, “I applaud the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation on its efforts to honor the heroes who liberated the Buchenwald Concentration Camp with a memorial. I request your (the German authorities) full and fair consideration of their application.”
Susan Eisenhower wrote: “The importance of having a memorial to the American liberators of Buchenwald is undeniable.”
From Chancellor Merkel’s office: “The Federal Government and the Chancellor personally attach the highest importance to the memory of the Shoah and to bearing the special responsibility that this entails for our country.”
JASHP is working with a Jewish veteran’s group in Britain towards a similar objective. We are working to place the first ever memorial honoring the British Liberators of Bergen-Belsen.
Both memorial efforts must be approved by their respective review commissions. Bergen-Belsen will review the proposal in early June. Buchenwald will review the proposal, July 3. Last week the Thuringische Landeszeitung wrote a very positive article about JASHP’s effort to do what is right.
Neither proposal is guaranteed approval.
This Memorial Day, whether the Germans approve the first-ever Memorials to the Liberators of Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen, we remember them.
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Klinger is president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.