Claim:
Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said the following after witnessing the aftermath of Nazi war crimes committed during the Holocaust: “Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the track of history some b****** will get up and say that this never happened.”
Rating:
Context
While Eisenhower did not say the above words verbatim, there was evidence he made a similar point. After visiting a German internment camp in 1945, he wrote in a letter: “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”
For several years, many people have attributed a quote to former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower about the possibility of propagandists, years later, denying Nazi war crimes.
The quote, which has appeared on X, Reddit, Goodreads and in various news articles, read: “Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some b****** will get up and say that this never happened.”
In short, there was no evidence that Eisenhower ever used the above phrase verbatim, though he did make similar remarks at the end of World War II, when the former president called for the documentation of Nazi atrocities to prevent later propaganda attempts to deny it ever took place.
Origin of quote unclear
Searching for numerous variations of the quote on Google and Newspapers.com found no reputable source authentically attributing it to Eisenhower. All the claim examples circulating online also provided no links to the source of the quote.
In 2018, Newsweek referenced the quote in an article but said: “It is unclear whether he ever actually expressed it in this manner.” Similarly, in 2019, fact-checking website Truth or Fiction concluded that Eisenhower “didn’t say” those specific words.
Truth or Fiction reported that the earliest investigation it found into the source of the quote was in this since-deleted blog post from 2009. That post found an early example of the quote in a since-deleted 2008 opinion article on Dominican Today, an online newspaper based in the Dominican Republic, which read (emphasis in bold, ours):
It is a matter of history that when Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect: ‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the track of history some b****** will get up and say that this never happened.’
The article’s author prefaced the quote with, “he said in words to this effect.” Many people attributing the quote to Eisenhower in the following years failed to add that detail. It was not clear whether this was the source of the fabricated quote.
For additional context, the Dominican Today article falsely claimed U.K. schools had removed Holocaust education from their curriculum in order to avoid offending the Muslim population. In 2007, the BBC reported that the content that happened to end up in the Dominican Today article a year later was false. The BBC article read: “E-mails are circulating, falsely claiming the U.K. has banned schools from teaching pupils about the Holocaust.” The BBC article did not include any reference to the fabricated quote.
What Eisenhower actually said
Eisenhower did advocate for keeping a record of Nazi atrocities in the event that someone would later deny they ever took place, though his authentic quote differed to the one circulating online.
In a 1945 letter, he described visiting a former internment camp and witnessing the horrors that took place there. The full letter is here (see Paragraph 2, Page 2). A section of the letter was available on the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library’s website, hosted by the National Archives (emphasis in bold, ours):
But the most interesting — although horrible — sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.
The fabricated quote appeared to paraphrase Eisenhower’s authentic comments above.
A National Park Service article about the former president’s work noted that he visited the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany on April 12, 1945. He sent the above letter days later. Per the article, Eisenhower wanted witnesses to see the state of the camps:
At Eisenhower’s insistence, in addition to the Congressional delegation, members of British Parliament toured Concentration Camp sites. So did the American press. Marshall helped organize a trip for eighteen American newspaper editors to see these same sites. By early May, the requests and coordination of other documentation trips became overwhelming.
In June, when Eisenhower returned to the United States following the German surrender, he was asked by reporters about whether publishing stories and photographs of Concentration Camps had been a wise idea. Eisenhower responded, “I think people ought to know about such things.”
Snopes has frequently covered Holocaust denial conspiracy theories.
