Several weeks ago, The New York Times published a handful of old black and white photos taken in the winter of 1944. They were part of a small collection of photographs recently donated to the United StatesHolocaustMuseum and Memorial in Washington. They belonged to a top administrator of Auschwitz who for several decades escaped justice, lived quietly in West Germany, was located, tried, spent several years in prison and died at the age of 89. The photos tell us much about the lives of the so-called ordinary Germans who worked at Auschwitz, the death factory in southern Poland.

 A week after these photographs appeared, the Times ran two stories concerning the disposition of art collections stolen from Hitler’s victims during what William Shirer called “The Nightmare Years.” In one story, two Dutch Jews, the Katz brothers, were forced to sell their collections of Dutch masters to Herman Goring’s “art agent.” The price? Their lives and those of their extended family.

The same week as these stories appeared, Ken Burns masterful documentary The War aired on PBS.  On the afternoon before the third segment aired Sept. 24, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, spoke at ColumbiaUniversity’s World Leaders Forum. The world’s best known Holocaust denier told his audience that one of history’s greatest crimes is open for debate. His rambling lecture and his presence on an American campus is inextricably connected to the coming of the Second World War.

 In the first volume of his history of the world conflict, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote that the theme of the book was “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to re-arm.”  Burns reminds us of what was at stake in global struggle which was initially seen as a storm on the distant horizon.  When the program ended, viewers asked the same question as Churchill. They also asked how a lowly soldier in the first war from the Viertelwald section of Austria, a beerhall demagogue in Munich, emerged in a nation that prided itself on its Kultur. In six years of war, Hitler and millions of his willing followers nearly shattered civilization. When it was over, Europe and Russia had been turned into charnel houses and more than 40 million people were dead. 

Hitler’s reach went far beyond Germany and Europe as Burns reminds us as he documented the transformation of three American cities. Many of their children died in this global struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Burns did a much greater service to truth than those responsible for inviting the president of Iran to their campus. As Churchill reminded us after the war, often times it is best to take national leaders at their word.  Hitler never hid his intensions and neither has Ahmadinejad.

Those responsible for inviting him gave Columbia a black eye.  They dishonored the memory of the millions who perished and the millions more called upon in what has been called The Good War.”  As the nation saw in the Burns’ series, many did not come home and their grave markers dot the landscape of Europe, Southeast Asia, and the small spits of islands in the Pacific. Of the 16 million who served, only four million remain and they are dying at a rate of 2,000 a day. We can only imagine what they thought when they read about Columbia’s decision and sat glued to their TV sets watching The War. Sadly, one of them did not live long enough to comment on Columbia’s decision in the name of academic freedom or watch the Burns program.

A year ago this past August, he was laid to rest in the National Military Cemetery on Long Island, not far from his brother-in-law. My wife’s father was a captain in the Third Army who fought his way through France, helped push back the Germans after heavy fighting south of Cologne, and with his men came face-to-face with the horrors at the concentration camp at Belsen. He and so many like him lived what we watched on our televisions and when he died two months after entering his 90^th year, the war was still only yesterday.  In his library, we found a copy of Eisenhower’s wartime memoir, Crusade in Europe, and he had underlined what Ike wrote abut the camps, in essence, future generations will not believe what the Third Army came upon when they found the death camps. 

The Iranian president understands this all too well. Some truths are not open for debate. After all, the earth is round, not flat.

-- Sander A. Diamond