By Grace Gilson
When she was five years old, Kitty Saks’ home in Vienna was commandeered by the Nazis, leading her family to flee to Brussels, where she was hidden in a convent until the Allies liberated Belgium. Twenty-seven members of her family were killed during the Holocaust.
Until a few weeks ago, Saks’ story could be read on the website of a U.S. Air Force unit, one of the many ways in which the military and government commemorated the Holocaust.
But now it is gone, one of many Holocaust remembrance articles taken down as part of the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s effort to rid Pentagon platforms of anything related to DEI.
In a Feb. 26 memo titled “digital content refresh”, Pentagon leadership was directed to “remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).”
More than 24,000 articles could potentially be removed, according to a database obtained by CNN.
Also caught in the net of the anti-DEI purge are articles focused on race, gender and LGBTQ experiences, as well as others on topics such as cancer awareness, suicide prevention and sexual assault.
An article on baseball great and World War II veteran Jackie Robinson, who served in the military and is widely admired for breaking baseball’s color line, was removed and has been reinstated.
Also removed was an article on the late Bea Arthur, the “Maude” and “Golden Girls” star who served in the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve during World War II. Arthur — who was born Bernice Frankel in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents and partially grew up in Cambridge, Maryland — died in April of 2009 at the age of 86.
Beyond Saks’ story, at least two more pages documenting Holocaust remembrance were also removed. One page, titled “A Cadet’s Perspective: Holocaust Days of Remembrance,” described a cadet’s experience visiting concentration camps a decade ago and the ways they informed his experience in the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Another page stripped from the Pentagon’s platforms commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Week and told readers to not forget the importance of religious diversity:
“The first place we must look is within ourselves. Do we allow stereotypes to determine how we think of another based on their religion? Do we diminish another’s beliefs because they are different from our own? It is in examining ourselves and the inner thoughts that we allow to foster, we will be able to create change,” the article read.
In a statement, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot — who referred to DEI initiatives as “Woke cultural Marxism” — said pages that had inadvertently been removed would be reinstated but did not detail if or when the Holocaust-related articles would go back up.
“We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms,” his statement said. “In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content so it recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period.”
A resident of Norfolk, Virginia, Saks died in May of 2021 at the age of 88. In the article about her experience, which can still be viewed on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, she was quoted saying, “I think the Holocaust should never be forgotten and it should be taught in schools, but not just a few lines.”
Grace Gilson wrote this article for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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