After the attacks, the filmmakers and WNET prepared a six-page rebuttal that The Nation (February 22, 1993) said "explains quite convincingly" the reasons for the controversy. Still, the dispute continued. On September 7th, 1993, Thirteen/WNET in New York announced in a press release the results of an internal review of the documentary by William Miles and Nina Rosenblum produced by the independent production company Miles Educational Film Productions, Inc. in association with Thirteen/WNET led by Morton Silverstein. The press release asserted that it had "confirmed allegations that some portions of the film contain factual inaccuracies" and that "Thirteen/WNET will continue to withhold public television station broadcasts until the documentary is corrected. " Jeffrey Goldberg, New York bureau chief of The Forward, and author of the Feb. 8 New Republic article "The Exaggerators," was reported to have said "what upset people in the Jewish community is the notion that this is Holocaust revisionism."

Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II is now defending itself against a contemporary front of historical and racial denial. The opening salvo of this shameless assault on the credibility of the film was fired by New York's stalwart conservative Herb London in his monthly propaganda organ, the New York Guardian. Other attacks on the film were seen in a broadside of hostile headlines: "`The Liberators': Trendy politics, dubious history", February 3, 1993, NEW YORK POST; "Concocting history ", Feb. 6, 1993, NEW YORK POST`; "The Exaggerators" , Feb. 8, 1993,The NEW REPUBLIC; "Film Halted on Blacks Freeing Jews, Movie is Withdraw on Unit's War Role" , Feb. 12, 1993, THE NEW YORK TIMES METRO; "WWII Documentary on Black GIs Pulled",Feb.13, 1993, WASHINGTON POST; "Doubts Mar PBS Film of Black Army Unit", March 1, 1993, The NEW YORK TIMES; "Massaging History / How Presumably Good intentions Turned a Poignant World War II Documentary Into a Fantasy of Black-Jewish Healing" , March 8, 1993, NEW YORK.

What quickly followed was a fusillade of imitative authoritative articles. "In today's supercharged media universe, it takes only one sighting of information streaking across the sky to prompt a thousand Journalists to keep repeating the pseudo-fact until it hardens into news. Yet 999 of these media accomplices have no way of knowing, whether the latest hot allegation is true-and with disturbing frequency, it isn't. The same phenomenon pops up in every one of these frenzies," says political scientist Larry Sabato author of Feeding Frenzy, "Rumors circulate without evidence, and the truth never seems to catch up."

Anyone who reconnoiters the relevant historical records will quickly discover that the hysterical assaults on "LIBERATORS" have used pseudo-factual blanks as their ammunition. Nonetheless, with the aid of a compliant press, these attacks have assigned the film to an historical purgatory.

Two critical reports, "LIBERATORS: A Background Report" ( Feb. 10, 1993), prepared for the American Jewish Committee by Kenneth S. Stern, and "FINDINGS OF THE REVIEW TEAM, An Examination of Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II" ( Aug.19, 1993), prepared for Thirteen/WNET by Morton Silverstein, were particularly guilty of perfunctory packaging of ostensibly neutral facts to produce a misleading facade of historical revisionism.

CourtLand Milloy of the Washington Post, under the headline "Liberators" Worth Seeing, Truths About Blacks, Jews in Another War" , reported in the Post's May 29, 1994 issue on my "wartime fight" to restore the film to public view. In my battle to liberate "Liberators" from a historical purgatory I have been fortunate to have access to several noteworthy public forums to vindicate the documentary in general, and to reveal the role that my late first cousin, William Alexander Scott III, had in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp in particular.

On March 19th, 1995 the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History of Atlanta, Georgia hosted a memorial lecture which I dedicated to the Scott family. The lecture, "William A. Scott III and the Holocaust: The Encounter of African American Liberators and Jewish Survivors at Buchenwald," was a special presentation to the Georgia Holocaust Commission. The lecture highlighted recent declassified records I discovered at the U.S. National Archives that were overlooked or ignored in the critical reports on "LIBERATORS". The records corroborate Scott's role in the liberation of the Buchenwald camp within the forty-eight hour period established in 1992 by the U.S. Army Center of Military History and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

In my lecture, I presented specific evidence that both W.A. Scott and his friend Leon Bass, members of the all-black 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion in General George S. Patton's 3rd Army performing liaison and army intelligence, went ahead of the battalion to reach the Buchenwald death camp within the designated 48- hours(April 11 & 12, 1945). The lecture was printed in its entirety in subsequent issues of the Atlanta Daily World (March 26-31,1995) . Copies of the archival materials related to the lecture were donated to the library in the name of "The William A. Scott III Holocaust Education Fund" for the library's "noncirculating specialized resources and collections for the study and research of the American and Diasporic Experience."

On April 11th, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, I along with Alex Gross, a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald, and Leon Bass, one of the camp's African American liberators, made presentations in a special program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Rubenstein Theater on behalf of the museum's Washington D.C. area school project entitled, "Bringing the Lessons Home: Holocaust Education for the Community."

From April 23rd through April 30th, a copy of my lecture as it appeared in the Atlanta Daily World, was featured among the exhibits in Ft. McPherson's DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. During the Holocaust commemoration exhibition the documentary "LIBERATORS: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II " was shown at various intervals daily.

On Nov. 6, 1996 I presented the lecture "'Liberators' Under Fire" (A Documentary Wounded by Friendly Fire) at the US National Archives II in College Park, Md.

At this point I will offer a few insights into the factual blanks that have been fired by the "anti-LIBERATORS" critics.

Jeffrey Goldberg's Feb. 8 New Republic article "The Exaggerators" proved to be an exaggeration in its own right, and WNET's own initial investigation (never released) had actually supported the documentary. As reported by Elizabeth Pochoda in The Nation, Feb.22, 1993:

"Since Goldberg's article appeared, the filmmakers and WNET in New York have been busy preparing a six-page response. In brief, it explains quite convincingly why documentation on the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald does not show the presence of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion: It was split apart and attached to other units. which were identified in the reports...Furthermore, the battalion commander who seemed to deny that his troops were involved in the liberation told WNET that he was in no position to confirm or deny whether some members of the 761st were at the camps- his duties at the time were administrative. It is the context in which his words were used by Goldberg that made them seem a denial. And so on with other quotes."

Whatever "factual flaws" there are in the PBS documentaries "The Civil War" and "Baseball", these films should continue to be seen, and whatever the similar "factual flaws" of the PBS documentary LIBERATORS: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II this film should not be hidden from the public. After all, the Silverstein Report concluded, (despite Silverstein's own "nit-piks"), that "Liberators is indisputably an important compelling documentary."

Furthermore, this double standard is particularly revealing in criticism that faults the film's producers for relying upon the un-critical testimony of black enlisted men without corroborating documentation, while simultaneously accepting at face value the superior veracity of their white officers that served in a racially segregated army predicated on white supremacy. With the advantage of hindsight, it is clear that the producers are on the right side of history and their critics are not. After every American war, from the American Revolution to World War II, white officers engaged in post-war racist revisionism that would require African-American soldiers to prove again for the next generation of white officers what they thought had been proved by their predecessors in the last war. One fundamental weakness in virtually all of the anti-LIBERATOR reports is the stupefying denial of this well documented historical legacy.

The anti-LIBERATORS tendency is to treat black testimony as suspect, unless it supports white critics, while accepting at face value the testimony of whites, unless it supports black testimony.

Martin Peretz in the Mar.9,1993 issue of The New Republic declares "Robert Abzug, a University of Texas historian who wrote Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, is listed as historical adviser to the film but was never asked for advice (my emphases). He says the film "violates any sense of historical accuracy, as does the Harcourt Brace book that came out with it." How does this square with the following letter dated, June 16,1992, addressed to Ms.Claire Wachtel, HarcourtBrace Jovanovich:

Dear Claire:

How is this for language:

The task of tracking World War II combat units, especially one as purposely under documented as the 761st, presents almost unsurmountable problems when placing them on one exact date or at one exact location. The combat situation was by nature characterized by a certain anarchy, one only compounded by the fact that this unit, as a number of others, often found itself split apart and attached to other units whose identities were used in official reports. Thus though the narrative that appears in Chapters _to_ is substantively accurate, it is based on oral histories, general accounts, and individual memories that may or may not agree in every detail.

DOES THIS LEAVE OUT ANYTHING? LET'S TALK ABOUT IT TOMORROW.

Best,

Robert H. Abzug
Professor of History and American Studies
Director, American Studies Program

Extended (in context) excepts of this scientific critique in the major anti- LIBERATORS reports follows:

Morton Silverstein's Report:

On April 11, 1945, the 183rd was not in the vicinity of the camp. They were at Mommenheim, Germany, approximately 170 miles from Buchenwald. On April 14th, they established their headquarters at Eisenach, some 60 miles from Buchenwald. Their headquarters would remain there until April 19th. It should be noted that although the unit was about the same distance from Buchenwald on the 14th as the 761st was on the 11th, the 183rd could move in jeeps and travel a much farther distance in a shorter period of time than soldiers traveling in tanks, which rarely moved farther than 20 to 25 miles a day. Official military records, which do not support the film's designation or conveyed impression of the 761st as "liberators" of either Buchenwald or Dachau, include situation reports, unit journals, after-action reports, morning reports, unit histories, and other salient documents at the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland, and St. Louis, Missouri. Official sources also include the U.S. Army Center of Military History, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, both in Washington, D.C, These records place the 761st Tank Battalion at a site some fifty to fifty-five miles from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and seventy miles from Dachau on April 29, 1945.

"Its 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 sixty miles away from where we were on the day [of liberation.]" Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Gates's account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were near either one of [the camps]," Bates says. According to Bates, tanks of the 761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across Germany was sixty to 100 miles away from the two camps.

Charles Gates and Paul Bates, respectively the commander of "C" Company and the. Lt. Colonel in charge of the entire 761st, assert that there is no way any of the tanks could have been involved in the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau. They point to the great distance from the rest of the unit(60 to 100 miles), and the facts that the tanks were gas guzzlers and that gas was hard to come by.

In a collection of oral histories, "The Invisible Soldier, The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II" (Wayne State University Press, 1975), compiled and edited by Mary Penick Motley, Horace Jones(a black officer), who served in Company B of the 761st (commanded by Lt. John Long) says:

"By the way, overseas we were known as a bastard outfit. I meant we didn't belong to any group permanently; we fought with any outfit that needed us. Sometimes we didn't see each other for a week or more. One company might be sent to the 87th, three or four tanks to some other outfit, and so on, so we'd be all over the place. It was definitely a ploy to keep from committing us together as a battalion as much as possible; whole units get credit while a few isolated tanks, no matter whether they saved the day or not, are overlooked."

I find it incredible that Gen. Fuller's revelations have not been explored by the critical reviews of LIBERATORS. Logic dictates that an entire military unit cannot occupy space at equal distance from some other place. When I asked Gen. Fuller to estimate the number of square miles over which the 183rd may have been dispersed at any given time he responded, "At least 100sq.miles". This renders all of the pseudo-scientific analysis of unit distances from concentration camps and daily records of distances covered by this military unit as superfluous nonsense, since they fall within the perimeters of the unit's normal area of dispersion.

The Silvertein report declares "Even if we assume that members of the 761st went into the camps, the film and book make claims that are, at the most generous, negligent sloppy." The following revelation will indicate the appalling degree to which the anti-LIBERATORS reports suffer this "negligent sloppy" affliction.

The Silverstein Report noted that "tanks ... rarely moved farther than 20 to 25 miles a day". For example, on April 12th, 1945, the Third Army's Sixth Armored Division(White), officially credited with Buchenwald's liberation, only traveled 23 miles on the second day of the camps liberation. The Silverstein Report notes that "records place the 761st Tank Battalion at a site some fifty to fifty-five miles from Buchenwald on April 11th, 1945, and seventy miles from Dachau on April 29, 1945." Is it possible that tanks of the 761st could cover 60 or more miles in a day? The answer is yes. How do I know? As fate would have it, What distance do you suppose the 6th Armored Division traveled on April 11th, 1945? On April 11th, 1945 the 6th Armd Div. covered 67miles!

Thus, the pseudo-scientific "Too Far Away Theory" proves to be totally bogus, utterly without foundation and thoroughly meritless. By ignominiously propagating this baseless thesis which is so easily disposed of with even a cursory review of the official records, the critics of LIBERATORS have fatally undermined the purportedly objective character of their reports.

The fatal psychological flaw in all Anti- LIBERATORS critiques is the denial that white racism in an Apartheid Army might have any impact on the objective recording or the motivation to maintain records on a segregated class with the same efficacy as the supposed superior class.

Kenneth Stern, in his report to the American Jewish Committee, states:

"In a prior conversation I had with Nina Rosenblum, she indicated that military records frequently downplayed the achievements of black troops. I asked Dr. Kesting about that claim, and he was adamant that that was not so. Reporters during the war, and historians after the war, have certainly underreported or distorted the achievement of black units. But it strains credibility to believe that intelligence reports of dangers lurking in unconquered terrain, or the need to be aware of 25,000 people around the next bend, would not be logged in the contemporaneous records because a black tanker was the source of that information -- military records that were of immediate life-and-death importance, and not history, were being written."

Although the Stern Report claims to have consulted a number of experts, the report only makes mention of Dr. Kesting. The Stern report claims that this expert was "adamant" that Nina Rosenblum's assertion "that military records frequently downplayed the achievements of black troops ",was "not so". This is yet another glaring revelation of the "negligent sloppy" nature of this report. The report's representation of Dr. Kesting's view here is not credible(to be generous). Dr. Kesting did graduate study in African-American history at Howard University. For Black History Month in February 1995, I, as resident historian of the black history club at Goddard Space Flight Center, invited Dr. Kesting to lecture on his graduate thesis which was subsequently published in the Journal of Negro History. The title:"Conspiracy to Discredit the Black Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division of WWII"(!). This graduate thesis preceded the Stern report by several years, and the lecture followed the report by two years.

Also Robert Abzug author of "Inside the Vicious Heart (Americans And The Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps) has written that "The task of tracking World War II combat units, especially one as purposely under documented (my emphasis) as the 761st, presents almost unsurmountable problems when placing them on one exact date or at one exact location."

Furthermore, at the behest of Dr. Leroy Ramsey, President and Publisher of THE BLACK AMERICAN VETERAN magazine, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci acknowledged that the records were inaccurate and unkempt with regard to military actions by black Americans in World Wars I and II. Accordingly, he ordered a review of those records to correct some of the omissions and give black Americans their due regard in the annals of American military history.

Finally, it took 40 years for the 761st's Unit Citation to come through, and the Silverstein Report stated that "The premise that the distinguished combat record of African- Americans in World War II has often been overlooked is also true". With regard to "military records that were of matters of immediate life-and-death importance", consider that the American Red Cross was openly race- conscious in its administration of the blood plasma program. Ironically, the blood program owed its very existence to the efforts of a black physician, Charles R. Drew of the Howard University medical school. The American Red Cross segregated black blood banks from white blood banks. The rationale was that the possibility of accidentally receiving plasma from a black donor might deter injured whites from agreeing to blood transfusions essential for their survival. These are but a few representative examples that demonstrate the extent of the Stern Report's naivety. It is the Stern Report that "strains credibility" under scrutiny.

"Prejudice, always blind to what it never wishes to see, and quick to perceive all it wishes" -... Frederick Douglass 1860.

"Mr. Kaiser, I am not biased against African-Americans as is evidenced by my more than thirty years of unblemished service in the U. S. Army but I am honor-bound to reject any claim made on their behalf that they were participants in the liberation of Buchenwald. I know the 761st Tank Battalion was a valiant, effective combat unit and this is confirmed by the Presidential Unit Citation bestowed on this unit in the late 1970s by President Jimmy Carter. ... The official citation of the presidential Unit Citation of the 761st Tank Battalion issued by the federal government during the term of President Jimmy Carter does not list either Buchenwald or Dachau as being among the achievements of the 761st nor does it present any evidence that the 761st was involved in the liberation of either of these infamous death camps. (A meaningful omission since this citation covers all of the service of the 761st from November 1944 until May 1945 in Europe.)

The film's 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, ... . But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an achievement of the unit.

According to "FINDINGS OF THE REVIEW TEAM, An Examination of Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II", Aug. 19, 1993, Prepared for Thirteen/WNET by: Morton Silverstein, Assissted by: Diane Wilson & Nancy Ramsey, "The review team can substantiate the presence of the 761st at Gunskirchen Lager (near Lambach, Austria) on its liberation days of May 4-5, 1945."

Now, since the presidential Unit Citation of the 761st Tank Battalion does not present any evidence that the 761st was involved in the liberation of the Gunskirchen Lager death camp, ("A meaningful omission since this citation covers all of the service of the 761st from November 1944 until May 1945 in Europe.") it can hardly be selectively used as proof to discredit another camp that it also omits!

Who is the more credible witness to the horrors of the holocaust? The Commandants of the concentration camps, or the camps survivors? Who maintained the records?; Who is more credible to give honest testimony on conditions inside a prison? The prison Warden, or the inmate?, Who maintains the records?; Who is more credible to be trusted with the truth about the brutality of life on the plantation? The masters, or the slaves?, Who maintained the records?; Who is more credible about racism in the service of an Apartheid Army? White Officers, or Black enlistees? Who maintained the records?.

"Son, always remember, History is only a fact when made,
it's an editorial when written."

"LIBERATORS UNDER FIRE"