Which GIs Liberated Buchenwald and Dachau?
Jesse Jackson's death on Feb. 17 occurred exactly 33 years after the notorious "Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II" was nominated for the 1993 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Premiering on Veterans Day - November 1992 on PBS's "The American Experience," the faux documentary directed by Bill Miles and Nina Rosenblum falsely claimed Black soldiers liberated Buchenwald and Dachau.
But on Feb. 11, 1993, the indomitable reporting of a small group of conservative journalists in New York City, led by 27-year-old Chris Ruddy, forced PBS to yank the odious work of racial and religious agitprop from the public airwaves.
Ruddy's first myth-shattering article, "PBS Documentary Lies About Liberation of Concentration Camps," was published in The New York Guardian in mid-December 1992.
After conducting "an intensive examination of Army records and interviews with military historians, Holocaust experts [and] World War II veterans," he authoritatively documented that the Black soldiers of the 761st Tank and 183rd Combat Engineers battalions did not free either Buchenwald or Dachau.
Since my late father, Barney Schulte, fought with the Sixth Armored Division, the genuine liberators of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, I joined the "anti-Liberators" brigade in December 1992, and my first of many articles about this unprecedented scandal was published in The New York Jewish Week on Feb. 19, 1993.
Concurrently, Jesse Jackson, the unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, was a leading campaigner for the infamous film.
On Dec. 17, 1992, Jackson and other prominent Democrats, including then-New York City Mayor David Dinkins, then-Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and then- Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., hosted a screening of "Liberators" at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem.
This colossal fiasco was attended by 1,200 Jewish and Black New Yorkers, and was broadcast on WNET/Channel 13, PBS's flagship in New York City and the film's chief financial sponsor.
Jackson also arranged a screening at Harvard University on Feb. 8, 1993, just three days before public broadcasting finally pulled the plug.
While a Jewish Telegraphic article on Feb. 19, 1993 found Jackson unavailable to comment on this shocking development, his plan for showing "Liberators" to Black and Jewish audiences in 25 other American cities was abruptly cancelled.
In stark contrast, Chris Ruddy published two more superb investigative articles in the March 1993 New York Guardian, and a significant discovery was that Jesse Jackson had disseminated the major myth that Black GIs liberated Buchenwald and Dachau during his unsuccessful campaign in 1988 for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In "A Chronology of Deceit: How The New York Times Propagated a Myth," Ruddy identified a May 31, 1988 article, "Jackson Makes Appeal For Black-Jewish Ties," which reported about a speech the previous day at a Holocaust liberation monument in Jersey City, a few hundred yards from the Statue of Liberty.
He claimed that U.S. Army Black engineers freed Buchenwald and Dachau, and the only fake liberator identified, Paul Parks, was a prominent supporter of the soon-to-be the Democratic presidential nominee, Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis.
On June 4, 1988, The Times published a long interview with this phony Dachau liberator, who four years later would have a cameo in “Liberators,” in which he was misidentified as serving in the 183rd Combat Engineers.
Parks, who served as the Massachusetts secretary of education during Gov. Dukakis' first term, was a member of the 365th Engineer Regiment, which was 300 miles from Dachau when it was liberated on April 29, 1945 by the 45th and 42nd Infantry divisions.
On Feb. 26, Mr. Ruddy penned a Newsmax op-ed from the Munich Security Conference, which debunked the many reprehensible falsehoods, widely circulating in America and Europe, that President Donald Trump is suffering from serious mental and/or physical ailments.
Thirty-three years after spearheading the righteous demolition of the factitious World War II history in "Liberators," Newsmax's CEO and editor in chief concluded with the following crucial question: "How long can media institutions push narratives detached from verified evidence before they erode what little trust remains?"
Ruddy cited the latest Gallup poll that Americans' trust in major media plunged from 72% in 1976 to 53% in 1997, four years after the "Liberators" debacle.
In 2025, only 28% of adults had a "great deal or fair amount" of trust in the media.
However, an extraordinarily positive development over the last three decades has been the rapid growth in major conservative media outlets, which have shattered the reprehensible monopoly of the Democrat-aligned left media.
In 1998, Chris Ruddy founded Newsmax, and that same year, the late Eric Breindel, the editorial-page editor of New York Post between 1986 and 1997, was a driving force behind the creation by Rupert Murdoch of Fox News.
Breindel also played a major role in debunking "Liberators."
Finally, U.S. House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson. R-La., acted wisely to deny the request from Jesse Jackson's family for his body to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
It would have been an unspeakable travesty to have an egregious falsifier of America's World War II history to share this supreme honor with veterans of that unrivalled struggle, who include John Kennedy, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Daniel Inouye, George H.W. Bush, Robert Dole, and Jimmy Carter.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read more Mark Schulte Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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