General Eisenhower's Wisdom

On April 12, 1945, Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton entered Ohrdruf, a subcamp in the Buchenwald concentration camp system.

(Eisenhower at Ohrdruf, courtesy of ushmm.org)

Eisenhower then cabled Gen. George C. Marshall:

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick…. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

A few days later, he sent another message to Marshall urging media coverage on the camps:

We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you could see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54's, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps.

In 1948, Gen. Eisenhower became president of Columbia University. Nearly 60 years later, the same university, which banned ROTC from its campus 37 years ago, hosted an ambassador from a regime whose leader in Tehran has called the Holocaust "a myth." Last month, this regime http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2006/11/irans_international_... target=_blank>held an "art" exhibition in Tehran questioning the Holocaust, and yesterday it http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/world/middleeast/12holocaust.html?_r=1... target=_blank>kicked-off an international Holocaust "conference" with David Duke among the speakers.

Because of Eisenhower's foresight, the strongest antidote to the Ahmadinejads of today's world who spin the Holocaust as "propaganda" -- even those who ply their trade at the same place the general once headed -- remains the photographs and film of the atrocities taken in 1945.