New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, whose founding co-chairman was the late Robert Morgenthau, has recently made headlines for an alleged censorship scandal. Morgenthau was the Manhattan district attorney between 1975 and 2009, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York during the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on May 5 claimed that an annual Jewish Leadership Conference, which was to be held at the Holocaust museum, was canceled because Ron DeSantis, the extraordinarily successful Republican governor of Florida, was a featured speaker.
"Ron DeSantis Is Persona Non Grata at a Holocaust Memorial," by conference co-chairmen Elliott Abrams and Eric Cohen, stated that the museum's staff told them to either "disinvite" Gov. DeSantis, or "our event was unwelcome."
Abrams and Cohen rejected the alleged ultimatum, and the conference, "Jews, Israel, and the Future of the West," will be held on June 12 at another Manhattan location. Scheduled speakers include DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the U.S. between 2013 and 2021.
By contrast, on May 9, the WSJ published a letter from Jack Kliger, president and CEO of the Holocaust museum in lower Manhattan, which attributed the cancellation to "logistical challenges," including too many potential attendees and a request for "additional police security."
While there has been much critical commentary in the conservative press and from politicians about this dispute, critics have overlooked two odious falsifications of World War II and Holocaust history that were widely disseminated by Morgenthau.
On December 17, 1992, DA Morgenthau, Harlem congressman Charles Rangel, NYC Mayor David Dinkins, and Jesse Jackson (the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988), hosted a screening at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem, of the soon-to-be-debunked PBS film, "The Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II."
This notoriously fake documentary, directed by William Miles and Nina Rosenblum, claimed that two African-American battalions helped liberate Buchenwald and Dachau, two of the largest concentration camps (53,000 prisoners) freed by the U.S. Army.
This night of infamy at the Apollo was broadcast in its entirety by WNET, PBS's flagship in NYC and the movie's primary financial backer. On Veterans Day in November 1992, "Liberators" was broadcast nationwide on PBS's "The American Experience," with a tendentious introduction by David McCullough, the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
But on Feb. 11, 1993, after vehement protests from the genuine liberators of Buchenwald (Sixth Armored and 80th Infantry divisions), and Dachau (45th and 42nd Infantry divisions), and the intrepid reporting of a small group of conservative journalists in the nation's media capital, including the 26-year-old Chris Ruddy (Newsmax's founder and CEO), PBS and WNET yanked the film from the public airwaves.
Public broadcasting also commissioned an independent investigation of the film's claims. The WNET report, compiled by award-winning documentarian Morton Silverstein, was released in September 1993, and it conceded that the African-American 761st Tank and 183rd Combat Engineers battalions played no role in the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau.
While WNET publicly disassociated itself from "Liberators" and overhauled procedures for approving and financing documentaries, Morgenthau (a World War II veteran of the U.S. Navy), Dinkins, Rangel and Jackson did not repudiate their reprehensible promotion of the myth that African-American GIs liberated Buchenwald and Dachau.
Similarly, Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, sent a videotaped message of support to the audience of 1,200 at the Apollo screening of "Liberators," and to the tens of thousands of other New Yorkers watching on WNET.
Wiesel, the Nobel Peace laureate, is listed on the website of the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of four "honorary chairs."
However, as I documented in a 2012 essay, "Stolen Valor: Democrats' Holocaust Distortions," Wiesel first disseminated the abhorrent falsehood that Buchenwald was freed by Black GIs at an International Liberators Conference at the State Department headquarters in Washington in October 1981.
In 1980, Wiesel was appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the governing body of the America's Holocaust museum in Washington.
Since my late father, Barney Schulte, was a decorated combat veteran of Gen. George Patton's crack Sixth Armored Division, the genuine liberators of Buchenwald, I wrote my first of many articles, about World War II and the liberations of the concentration camps, for the New York Jewish Week in mid-February 1993.
Finally, DA Robert Morgenthau's grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and he heroically alerted the world to the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during World War I.
Similarly, Robert Morgenthau's father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was President Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Treasury between 1934 and 1945. In early 1944, he heroically pushed the president to finally establish the War Refugee Board, which saved the lives of several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews.
Robert Morgenthau's poisoned legacy is his heinous support for the Democratic-concocted myth that African-American soldiers liberated Buchenwald and Dachau.
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.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.