Columbia's former president Dwight Eisenhower warned the world would forget WWII horrors against Jews
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, four-star general, spent 5 years as president of Columbia University, 1948-1953. Yet many appear to have forgotten his WWII-era warnings about rampant antisemitism.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s career achievements are unparalleled in American history.
Popular two-term president. Supreme Allied Commander of Allied forces in Europe in World War II. Led the epic D-Day invasion, helped reclaim postwar peace, launched NASA into orbit, sent America rolling down the interstate highway system.
Also mentored a then-future president, Ronald Reagan, on everything from national security to running for higher office.
Ike also served for five years as president of Columbia University.
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Given the chaos and disruption on that campus in April 2024, however, it is almost unimaginable that a four-star general of his caliber would lead that institution of higher learning today.
He took the position at the top of the elite New York City Ivy League university in May 1948 — and resigned from it only after he won election to the U.S. presidency and moved into the White House in Jan. 1953.
The year he became Columbia's president, Eisenhower said, "The principal purpose of education is to prepare the student for effective personal and social life in a free society. From the school at the crossroads to a university as great as Columbia, general education for citizenship must be the common and first purpose of them all," as Columbia itself noted.
Several years before that, and as part of his lasting legacy, he vowed to keep alive the memory of the shock and horror, the images of evil lurking within our species, that he observed at the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany in April 1945.
"The things I saw beggar description," Eisenhower wrote to Gen. George C. Marshall, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Washington, D.C.
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"The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick."
The victims were mostly Jews — first dehumanized by Adolf Hitler’s far-left National Socialist German Workers Party, then brutalized in a systemic extermination of humans on an industrial scale.
"Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive," the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reported of Ike’s arrival at Ohrdruf.
Eisenhower instinctively knew that the atrocities defied belief — and therefore needed proof.
He vowed "to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda,'" he wrote in his message to Gen. Marshall.
One third of the global population of Jews, about 6 million people, were slaughtered by the National Socialists in the Holocaust.
Millions of other people were systemically killed, too.
At Eisenhower’s frantic urging, members of Congress and a cadre of journalists descended on Ohdruf, and then on dozens of other death camps like it that the Allies discovered amid disbelief as they swept through Germany in the final weeks of World War II.
"He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves," the Holocaust Museum notes.
It added, "Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied."
That day is here right now — on the campus of Eisenhower’s own Columbia University.
Anti-Israeli student groups took over the Columbia quad this week as current university President Minouche Shafik testified before Congress on Wednesday about antisemitism on her campus.
"Antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly," Shafik said in her opening remarks.
Complaints of antisemitism and Islamophobia have increased at the New York City campus of 35,000 students, prompting the school to put limits on demonstrations, the Associated Press reported. Now, protests can be held only on weekdays at certain times and locations — with advance notice, the AP also noted.
Shafik cited this as evidence the school is serious about protecting students, saying 15 students have been suspended and six are on probation for breaches — though some maintain this interferes with free speech.
Yet a day after her appearance, a current Columbia University student who is of Jewish heritage told "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning, April 18, that she does not feel safe at all on campus.
Columbia, and other schools around the nation, as well as city streets, have been overtaken by calls for Israel’s destruction since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks slaughtered more than 1,000 civilian citizens of the Jewish-majority nation.
Antisemitic protesters have shouted "by any means necessary" and "from the river to the sea" – essentially calling for another Holocaust, for the extermination of Jews.
The phrase "by any means necessary" has been spread around campuses, including Columbia's, by the far-left group National Students for Justice in Palestine.
Its platform comes straight from Hitler's far-left National Socialist playbook: monolithic government and a belief that Jews are colonizers.
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"A parasite in the bodies of other nations," as Hitler called Jews in "Mein Kampf."
Columbia's deans issued a statement on Dec. 20 that acknowledged the hatred on its campus.
"Phrases such as ‘by any means necessary’ and ‘from the river to the sea,'" the school noted, are "antisemitic and deeply hurtful."
Yet the shouts for the elimination of the Jewish state continue at Columbia and on other American universities today.
Eisenhower predicted this day.
He said the horrors of antisemitism, of the Holocaust, might be forgotten.
Many believe that America’s educational system today has failed to heed his important history lesson.
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