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80 Years After Dachau Concentration Camp Liberation, Witnesses Remember
Lockered Gahs, known unofficially as Bud, was a 20-year-old soldier in the U.S. Army who had been fighting for a year when he and his unit first entered the Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich in 1945.
His unit — the 42nd Infantry Division — had seen harrowing combat since it began fighting in France. But, he said, liberating the concentration camp was altogether different.
“When we opened the gates to Dachau, it was only then have we truly understood what we had been fighting for,” Mr. Gahs, 100 years old, told a crowd that included survivors, families and dignitaries in Dachau on Sunday.
When he and his unit went through the gates, Mr. Gahs encountered prisoners so malnourished, sick and maltreated that they seemed scarcely alive. On the way there, soldiers had found piles of bodies inside train wagons.
On Sunday, Jean Lafaurie, 101, who survived the camp after he was arrested in his village in France, spoke of the sadistic treatment the prisoners had been forced to endure.
Other survivors’ minds were on the present. Mario Candotto, 98, of Italy, who survived the camp but lost four of his brothers and both parents, said: “I hear talk about weapons and nationalism, and the thought occurs to me: Have people learned nothing?”
The 80th anniversary of the end of the Nazi era — and with it anniversaries of the liberations of concentration camps — comes at a pivotal time for Germans.
The last of the survivors, liberators and perpetrators are dying of old age, and with them any living memories of the Holocaust. At the same time, the far right is becoming established. While the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, whose leaders have repeatedly downplayed the Holocaust, was once a fringe party, it is currently the most popular party in Germany, according to some polls.
“We are truly living in a period of upheaval; I feel this at the memorial sites, and at Dachau in particular,” Gabriele Hammermann, the director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, told The New York Times. “It acts as a seismograph.”
The anniversary also comes after a pronounced change in the tone of the relationship between Germany and the United States. While Washington was once instrumental in promoting a culture of accountability and remembrance, President Trump’s administration has made its preference for the AfD very clear.
In January, Vice President JD Vance shocked German leaders when he told a crowd in Munich that they should stop shunning the AfD. Last week, after the AfD was officially labeled an extremist party by Germany’s domestic intelligence unit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a social media post, called the decision by Germany’s intelligence unit “tyranny in disguise,” adding that Germany’s border policies were instead the country’s “extremist” problem.
Antisemitic hate crimes have also increased in Germany. In a country that has long espoused the motto “never again,” many worry that liberal democracy is under threat. In a poll carried out last year, 69 percent of respondents said they thought populism was a threat to democracy.
Even the people who run the concentration camp memorial sites have noted a disquieting uptick in thefts and petty crimes committed on their grounds. In 2019, Nikolai Nerling, a far-right video blogger and provocateur, was convicted of incitement for videos in which he interviewed Dachau visitors and relativized the crimes of the Nazis. Last year thieves stole exhibit items from the camp’s gas chamber.
Established just weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Dachau camp initially held political opponents. It was a model for future camps and was made a formal training site for paramilitary S.S. troops before they were sent to run the new camps that Germany built across Eastern Europe when the war started. More than 40,000 people died in Dachau, which, over the 12 years it was active, held more than 200,000 prisoners.
Built less than 10 miles outside Munich, it also distinguished itself from camps constructed later during the regime, which were located far outside the Reich’s borders. The injustice and atrocities committed within the Dachau camp could not be easily ignored by the general population.
U.S. soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions who liberated the camp were among the first Americans to witness and document the horrors of the Nazi regime. The scenes they encountered entering the camp 80 years ago changed many men for life. On Sunday it was mostly the families of the liberators who attended the ceremony.
Of the survivors who came to Dachau on Sunday, most were in their 90s and 100s, indicating that this could be the last major anniversary involving people with firsthand memories of the camps. Among the youngest was Leslie Rosenthal, who had traveled from Canada. Born just three months before the liberation, Mr. Rosenthal recently celebrated his 80th birthday.
“With the passage of time, survivors and eyewitnesses are quickly dwindling,” he said, noting that he and the seven babies who were born in Dachau in the final months before liberation would soon become the “last living links to the Holocaust.”
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right political party, launched her fourth bid for the presidency on Wednesday. Her campaign rally comes a day after a court upheld her embezzlement conviction and shortened a ban on her eligibility to run for public office.
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As Iran, Russia’s war with Ukraine and NATO’s defense spending dominate the organization’s summit in Ankara, one issue that has escaped the media glare is the increasingly antisemitic rhetoric coming from Turkish leaders.
As relations between Turkey and Israel continue to hit new lows, a war of words between the two nations has erupted.
In a July 2 interview with CNN Türk, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Israel has “become a burden that humanity can no longer bear,” The Jerusalem Post reported.
Fidan also said Israel is representative of “humanity’s common problems,” and asked other countries to apply pressure to the Jewish State, according to Israel National News.
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Anti-Israel protesters rally in Istanbul, Turkey, Feb. 17, 2024, over the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
In a press statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called Fidan’s words “a clear call for genocide. The Jewish people know very well what happens when such words are allowed to go unchallenged. The first step on the road to genocide is dehumanization.
“This is a sentence that sounds very familiar to sentences from about 100 years ago,” Sa’ar added. “To speak about a people as a ‘problem for humanity.’ What do you do with a ‘burden that you can no longer bear?’” he asked.
Sinan Ciddi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and director of FDD’s Turkey program, told Fox News Digital Fidan’s statement was “some of the vilest rhetoric to come out of any statesman since the Holocaust.”
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan speaks during a rally in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 28, 2023. (Dilara Senkaya/Reuters)
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Ciddi said escalated anti-Israel rhetoric in Turkey “goes all the way back to 2008,” when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “began the process of ripping apart the bilateral relationship between Israel and Turkey. But, after Oct. 7, it just went into overdrive,” he said. “I have never heard any Arab leader utter the words that Foreign Minister Fidan has said.”
Yet Erdoğan has condemned antisemitism; the Turkish Minute reported that he told Turkish religious minority representatives at an Ankara dinner in March that “just as Islamophobia is a crime against humanity, antisemitism is also a crime, an evil that cannot be considered reasonable or legitimate.”
Despite his recent condemnation, he and other ministers have continued with their rhetoric against the Jewish state.
In June, Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ҁiftҁi said the world would “witness the liberation of Jerusalem,” according to the Times of Israel.
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In May 2021, the Times of Israel reported that Erdoğan called Israelis “murderers,” claiming they were “only satisfied by sucking their [victims’] blood.” At the time, the State Department spokesperson issued a strong condemnation of Erdoğan’s “antisemitic comments regarding the Jewish people,” calling them “reprehensible.”
In May 2025, Erdoğan invoked similar language, accusing Israel of being “a terror state that feeds on the blood, lives and tears of the innocent,” Israel National News reported.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, right, and Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon speak to journalists ahead of a United Nations Security Council meeting at U.N. headquarters on August 5, 2025 in New York (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
Anti-Israel sentiment in Turkey has infiltrated far beyond leadership. A Pew Research poll from June found that Turkey had the highest level of anti-Israel sentiment of any polled country, with 91% of the population holding “very unfavorable” views on Israel, 6% holding an “unfavorable” view, and just 1% expressing any favor of Israel.
In response to questions about whether the State Department plans to respond to antisemitic statements from Turkish leadership, a spokesperson told Fox News Digital that “Turkey is a longstanding and valued NATO ally, and we continue to engage on all aspects of our important and multi-faceted relationship.”
Ciddi said there are “numerous channels” for the State Department and Trump administration to reprimand Turkey for its unchecked hatred.
“The president could obviously pull aside a Turkish counterpart and demand an apology,” he explained, while the State Department could address the comments or place Turkey on a watchlist.
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NATO leaders participate in a summit in The Hague, Netherlands, June 25, 2025. (Handout/Latin America News Agency via Reuters Connect)
As the two-day NATO summit winds down in Ankara, Ciddi said Turkey “is going to try and overshadow anything else” and “promote itself as the sort of premiere NATO ally, so we need to watch out for Turkey’s whitewashing of its human rights record.
“We cannot safeguard our allies’ democratic norms, rights and practices if we don’t hold member states like Turkey accountable for the threats that it presents.”
The Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
The order comes three years after a jury found out Trump has sexually abused and defamed the writer.
Published On 8 Jul 2026
A federal judge has ruled that writer E Jean Carroll can collect the more than $5.8m that US President Donald Trump was ordered to pay after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed her, clearing the way for the money to be released after the US Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
Judge Lewis A Kaplan ruled on Wednesday that Carroll can be paid the original $5m award granted to her by the jury, along with interest that has accrued since the verdict in 2023. Carroll’s lawyers had asked for the funds to be released after the Supreme Court refused on June 29 to hear Trump’s appeal.
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“This is the end of the line,” Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan wrote in a court filing, adding, “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”
Less than an hour after the judge issued the order, Trump appealed it.
“The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said in a statement.
Carroll first accused Trump in 2019, writing in a memoir that he had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996. Trump denied the allegation, saying he had never met Carroll, accusing her of lying to sell books and for political reasons, and calling the claim a “hoax.”
Carroll sued him for defamation over those comments later that year, accusing him of damaging her reputation by suggesting she had lied for personal gain. She filed a second lawsuit in 2022, accusing Trump of battery/sexual abuse and defamation over another denial he posted on Truth Social in 2022, again calling the allegation a hoax.
In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and for defaming her through his 2022 statements. It did not determine that Trump was liable for rape.
A second jury awarded her $83.3m in 2024 for the defamatory statements Trump made in 2019 when he was president, after she first went public with the allegation.
Trump has continued to fight both verdicts.
After the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, He called the lawsuit “a Fake Case” and pledged to continue fighting what he described as a “Weaponisation and Lawfare Case.”
On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision not to hear the appeal. They argued that Trump would suffer “irreparable harm” if the money is paid out, because Carroll has said she intends to donate it, which would make it difficult to recover the funds if the verdict is later overturned.
Trump is also still appealing the $83.3m judgment, arguing his 2019 comments were made while he was president and are therefore protected by presidential immunity. The Department of Justice has also launched a criminal investigation into Carroll over whether she committed perjury during her testimony.
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