Museum of American Armor marks 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps

Barbed wire separated the audience at a museum in Old Bethpage from a Sherman tank on Friday — an attempt to give a small feel of what it was like 80 years ago when American troops liberated Nazi concentration camps.

And when the uniformed “soldiers” climbed down from the tank, they handed out small chocolate bars — just as the American GIs handed bits of food to starving prisoners when they liberated the Dachau and Buchenwald camps in Germany and discovered the horrors of what the Nazis had perpetrated.

More than 100 people gathered at The Museum of American Armor on Friday to commemorate the Holocaust, one of the darkest chapters in world history, as well as the role Americans played in helping to end it. Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945; Dachau followed on April 29, 1945.

The event attracted students from a Hebrew school, military veterans, public officials and at least one Holocaust survivor.

Americans had little idea of what was happening in the camps until U.S. troops arrived under the leadership of General Dwight Eisenhower, according to Richard Schoonhoven, an associate professor of law and philosophy at West Point, who spoke at the event.

Stunned soldiers found piles of emaciated corpses, decomposing human remains and dazed “human skeletons” walking around — survivors of the camps.

“I've always thought that the invasion on D-Day was probably the pivotal moment of the 20th century, if not the last several hundred years,” Schoonhoven said. “And the culmination of that, of course, is the liberation of the camps and the defeat of Nazism.”

He added, “It was an incredibly evil regime that had to be defeated and mercifully, was defeated."

Eisenhower, who later became president, brought Gens. George S. Patton and Omar Bradley with him to witness the liberation of the camps. “Patton, known, of course, for his iron will, was so overcome that he reportedly had to step outside,” Schoonhoven said.

Soldiers were ordered to take photographs and film footage and Eisenhower invited journalists and dignitaries, the professor said.

“Eisenhower insisted on documentation because he foresaw what would come, that there would be those who in time would seek to diminish or even deny these atrocities,” Schoonhoven said.

Some of the film and photographs taken by Eisenhower’s troops are now in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

'Moral triumphs'

Speaker after speaker on Friday denounced the horrors of the Holocaust and warned against a rise in hatred and antisemitism.

“The Holocaust revealed both the depths of human cruelty and the heights of human courage,” said Brookville Mayor Daniel Serota. “Those who risked their lives to save others continue to remind us of our capacity for moral action even in the darkest circumstances.”

Abby Rutta, a senior at North Shore Hebrew Academy in Great Neck and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, said the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas that killed 1,200 people was a reminder that Jewish people remain vulnerable.

“Oct. 7 made it painfully clear that history does not always stay in the past,” she said. 

Another speaker, Bernie Furshpan of the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center in Glen Cove, said that “80 years ago, the unimaginable was met with the undeniable. The gates of Buchenwald, gates that held back humanity, were thrown open by American GIs, soldiers of flesh and blood, who risked their lives … Those moments of liberation were more than military victories. They were moral triumphs.”