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most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three

men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.

McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the

761st."

'It's totally inaccurate.

The men couldn't have been

where they say they were

because the camp was 60

miles away from where we

were on the day of liberation'

Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association

with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of

the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.

"You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with

shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic

fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so

disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.

His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the

battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two

sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C

Company.

Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated

Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial

Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free

either camp.

"It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who

commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were

because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of

liberation."

Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's

account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were

near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the

761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across

Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not

claim to have liberated those camps," he says.

Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion

book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by

blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has

conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in

the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black

soldiers.

One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed

that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.

I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"

says the survivor.

Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust

revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says

the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone

interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community.

How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely

incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most

Jewish people think, I can't understand it."

She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what

kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first

place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation.

People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says

it stands by the film's veracity.

The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems

all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among

other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of

Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and

its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary.

The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on

the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own

Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president

Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an

achievement of the unit.

"It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not

compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the

761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat

performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it

blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt."

Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion,

which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The

unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the

Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its

liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof

of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never

contacted him to discuss the unit's history.

Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls

himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the

Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the