fascinating letter from Dwight Eisenhower
Via Alan Jacobs of Text Patterns fame, check out this amazing letter from Dwight Eisenhower from the last days of World War II.
Some of the people who have commented on it have remarked about Eisenhower’s writing style, which is really remarkable in its clarity and directness. It’s also really interesting to read his personal reflections on towering historical figures like Omar Bradley or Patton.
What really stays with you, though, is his brief description of touring a liberated death camp, and in particular, his prediction even then of Holocaust denial. This is almost a month before V-E day; the world doesn’t yet know the extent of Germany’s crimes. There’s no greater knowledge of the Holocaust yet to invite denial. And yet the terrible and persistent history of anti-Jewish hatred already compels Eisenhower to vow to stand witness against those who would in the future dismiss the Holocaust as propaganda.
Freddie, thanks for this, thank you very much. The letter brought back memories of my father (305th Combat Engineers, 80th Division (the old Blue Ridge), 3rd Army, Maj. Gen. George Patton cmdg.) who served in the action Gen. Eisenhower is discussing.
My dad had very few problems with Patton and got to meet him during combat on a couple of occasions. The reason why the troops overlooked his idiosyncrasies is because, usually, you’d find him and his command vehicle on or near the front, kicking American commanders forward and encouraging the grunts.
My father was involved in liberating a couple of the concentration camps, one may have been Buchenwald but I’m not sure. He and his platoon were ordered to go to the nearby town and bring back the adult males to bury the dead. He operated a bulldozer to get the bodies of these poor souls into the ground as quickly as possible. He never talked much about it.
My father lived to be 83 and never forgot the crack of the Mauser or the whine of the 88.Report
An interesting letter as you say, but what is in it that leads you to the conclusion that Eisenhower had the history of European anti-Semitism on his mind? He doesn’t mention Jews anywhere in the letter. I would think that Eisenhower expected that scenes like this would be written off as run-of-the-mill demonization of the enemy, similar to the extreme anti-German propaganda produced by the Allies during WWI (the Hun with babies on their bayonets, etc.). Yours is an anachronistic interpretation, I fear.Report
There is nothing in this correspondence at all about Jews or anti-Semitism. This is a total stretch. Might not he be more concerned by the Germans denying what had happened to avoid punishment and prosecution?Report