GIs and the Holocaust

In the Saturday Letters column, April 16, Keith R. Matzinger of Camarillo, in commenting on the “well-deserved publicity” of “Schindler’s List” (“Americans Gave Lives”), said he had “not seen a single mention of the thousands of Americans who gave their lives to end the Holocaust.”

The film, and any critique of it, does not address itself to the Allied invasion of Europe and the fight to destroy the German army. By the time of D-day, June 6, 1944, the fate of Europe’s Jews had long been sealed. Probably two-thirds of prewar Jewry had already been killed one way or another. Our gallant U.S. and Allied soldiers fought their way across the Rhine in less than one year, but they did not even know that the death camps existed, and they were astounded by what they found in Germany.

Our high command, from Franklin D. Roosevelt down through the State Department, Gen. George C. Marshall and the rest, knew about the camps and the transport of Jews from all of Europe to Poland and eastern Germany but chose not to acknowledge the situation, lest our war effort be “diverted” from the primary task of wiping out Germany.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial in Washington, and probably every other Holocaust memorial, does honor the GIs who assisted in the liberation of the death camps and who gave succor to the pitiable, and pitifully few, survivors.

ROBERT E. GREEN

Cmdr. (ret.), U.S.N.R.

Sherman Oaks