How the Holocaust Shaped Henry Kissinger's Worldview
he first foreign-born U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who has died at 100, will likely be remembered most for his service as a diplomat in the 1960s and '70s, as an adviser to Presidents, or as the holder of a controversial record on human rights, based on his support for campaigns such as the U.S. bombings in Cambodia that killed tens of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War.
But the public service of which he himself was proudest was of a very different sort. Though he rarely wanted to talk about it, Kissinger helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp.
Back then, Kissinger was a 22-year-old German-born Army Sergeant in the American 84th Infantry Division. Though he would later say that become a GI helped him to feel closer to his adopted homeland — to which he had immigrated as a teenager, before he changed his name from Heinz to Henry — fighting in Germany made his roots all too real.
"On April 10 [1945], just days before the roundup of the Gestapo sleeper cell, Kissinger stared the Holocaust in the face when he and other members of the 84th Division stumbled upon the concentration camp at Ahlem," Niall Ferguson wrote in his biography Kissinger, Vol. 1, 1923-1968: The Idealist, in which Ferguson republished Kissinger's two-page reflection on that day.
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