This part of the country’s response has been largely forgotten, in favor of a story where the U.S. plays a more heroic part.

The liberation of the concentration camps in the spring of 1945 plays a central role in public memories of the war today, along with the Allied landings in Normandy on “D-Day” in 1944. The hall through which millions of visitors have entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is lined with flags of the “liberator divisions” of the U.S. Army.

There is no question that the arrival of American forces at Buchenwald, Dachau and other camps across western and southern Germany saved thousands of prisoners facing murder or death by starvation and sickness. In reality, however, the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews had largely concluded, and primarily took place hundreds of miles to the east in what is today Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic states. By the time American forces landed in western Europe, Europe’s Jewish population had already been reduced to a few small pockets.

Within weeks of the arrival of American troops at Buchenwald, Americans saw images and newsreel film of the horrors of the camps. However, it took decades for the story of camp liberation to become the most important act of the war in Europe in Americans’ minds. It would not be until the 1980s, when the liberators and survivors were entering old age, that the Holocaust was firmly entrenched in American school curricula and popular culture.

One important consequence of this long wait was that the stories told by and about liberators changed in the intervening decades. As Americans became more familiar with the events of the Holocaust through television and films, liberator stories began to grow more similar to each other and merged into a general story of the Holocaust, which increasingly focused on the horrors of the death camps in German-occupied Poland. Liberators of Buchenwald describing the event decades afterward, for example, thought they remembered gas chambers at the camp, when in fact there were none at that location.

Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland – the most infamous camp facility, with its gates saying “Arbeit macht frei” – came to represent all concentration camps in American memory, and even in family stories. In 2008, for example, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told a crowd about his great-uncle’s participation in the liberation of Auschwitz. Auschwitz was actually liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945. Obama’s campaign later clarified that his great-uncle, Charles Payne, participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald.

The centrality of camp liberation to the American story of the Holocaust has real consequences. It turns the Holocaust into a story of American triumph over evil and overlooks the country’s refusal to do more to save the victims.

This simplistic version of a complex history has allowed many Americans to use “the Holocaust” and “Nazism” as shallow symbols for any kind of government action they oppose and deem oppressive, particularly public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Opponents have compared infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci to SS physician and torturer Dr. Josef Mengele. Representative Marjorie Greene has compared face mask rules to forcing Jews to wear Star of David badges, and Capitol police agencies to the Nazi-era Gestapo.

As Burns’ documentary emphasizes, the U.S. is once again in a time of national reckoning about race, discrimination and histories of oppression. In the final minutes of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” viewers see marchers in Charlottsville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” television pundits opining about the threat of cultural decline through immigration, the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, and the Jan. 6 riot. There in the crowd, wearing his sweatshirt, is Robert Keith Packer.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Adam R. Seipp, Texas A&M University. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.

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Adam R. Seipp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.