06-04-2025
The soldiers of color who freed concentration camps 80 years ago
U.S. forces liberated Nazi concentration camps 80 years ago this month. Among the liberators were Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American soldiers whose actions today are often forgotten.
Why it matters: The Pentagon recently purged references to soldiers of color from its websites, per an order by President Trump. But civil rights advocates say the liberators warrant recognition for their service at a time when many returned home to discrimination, segregation and racial violence.
The big picture: U.S. forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945 — the first of many camps to be freed on the western front from April to May.
It's unclear how many soldiers of color were involved. But evidence collected during the past 25 years indicates that many who helped liberate camps where Jews were imprisoned were themselves in racially segregated military units.
Robert Williams of the USC Shoah Foundation, a group that preserves survivor testimonies of the Holocaust, tells Axios the soldiers' actions at the camps and throughout the war speak volumes today, amid the nation's rising antisemitism and distrust between some groups.
Zoom in: Holocaust museums and civil rights projects have been racing to collect oral histories, memoirs and family statements to piece together this overlooked part of the liberation story.
The USC Shoah Foundation, the Voces Oral History Center at the University of Texas, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem in Israel are among those that have collected testimonies of survivors and liberators.
The liberators "were not only willing to fight, but eager to fight for the liberal democratic ideals of the United States, despite facing oppression of racism and marginalization at home," Williams says.
What they're saying: "I closed my eyes and waited to be shot. Then, I heard him speak English," Dachau survivor Solly Ganor said in a 1993 interview, recalling when soldiers in a Jeep found him in the snow.
Ganor recalled looking up and seeing Asian "angels. ... I didn't know what to make of this."
One of the men who found the teenaged Ganor was Clarence Matsumura, a Japanese American soldier in the segregated 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, which was made up of Asian Americans from the West Coast and Hawaii. Matsumura wrapped Ganor in a blanket and carried him to safety, saving his life.
Johnnie Meza Marino, a Mexican American soldier from Texas, told The Voces Oral History Center in 2001 that his unit liberated the Hadamar and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps in Germany.
Marino, who died in 2015, recalled that as his unit approached more camps, he noticed dust flakes falling on his uniform — from the tall chimney of one of the camps' crematoriums.
Another soldier recalled how being a liberator affected him.
"When I entered the Bushenwald concentration camp, I was an angry Black soldier," Leon Bass, who died in 2015, recalled in his 2011 memoir."My blinders had come off ... I now understood that human suffering was not relegated to just me."
Zoom out: More than 1.5 million soldiers of color served during World War II in the European and Pacific theaters. Black and Asian American service members were forced to serve in segregated units.
Japanese American soldiers served while their families back home were forced into detention camps. Mexican American and Native American soldiers served with white soldiers but often faced intense discrimination.
Their experiences led some of the soldiers to work for civil rights once they returned home, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, founder and director of The Voces Oral History Center, tells Axios.
"When you were able to see human beings as human beings, and see our common humanity, then I think that you don't just advocate for opportunities for your own group," Rivas-Rodriguez said.
The experience would plague others, such as Jack Bushyhead, a member of the Cherokee Nation and who took part in the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945.
Visions of the starved victims Bushyhead saw on the Nazis' "death train" haunted him until his death in 1977.
"When he was inebriated, he would even see these people — he called them the little people,'' his daughter, Jaxine Bushyhead Gasper, told the Boston Globe in 2001. ''He just drank himself to death. I don't think Dad ever got over the war.''
Others would go on to speak out against antisemitism and help create local Holocaust museums.
