Editor’s Note: Bob Hilliard is an extraordinary American. He served as a combat infantryman in World War II, where he was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. After that, he played a central role in bringing the continuing barbarism of the Holocaust to light, and shaking the American public from its complacency.
That was just the beginning for Bob. He spent the eight subsequent decades speaking truth to power, and helping shape the public institutions in America that are tasked with keeping us informed about the world around us, helping realize our Founders’ vision for an active and engaged citizenry.
Bob was early to many of the trends that shape American life today. In the 1980s and ‘90s, he foresaw the power of the internet as a force that anti-democratic actors could use to organize and recruit. For the past decade, he has been calling out—with increasing urgency—the threat that Donald Trump and his administration pose to American democracy.
Last month Bob celebrated his 101st birthday. He has seen war, depression, the creation of the post-war order, and—more recently—our retreat to nativism and authoritarian populism. Just as during World War II, he has a message for Americans. He is calling on us to channel our better angels, and not give in to nihilism and complacency. It is our patriotic duty to listen.
By Dr. Robert L. Hilliard
My 16th year was a momentous one. I graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn, New York. I held my first paying job, delivering telegrams to and running errands for Postal Telegraph customers for 30 cents per hour. My family moved from New York to Wilmington, Delaware, where my father got a job for $40 per week, which enabled my family to rent a small house where, for the first time in my life, I had a room of my own. Euphoria. Anyone growing up in a room of their own may find it difficult to understand the significance of that.
For the first time in my life that I can remember, I saw my father most evenings and on Sundays. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, I rarely saw him. He worked 18 hours a day as proprietor of a small retail shop, my mother spelling him during the day so he could get a few hours of sleep. But it enabled us to have a place to live and food on the table.
The Great Depression had a lasting impact on my life’s commitments. I recall several incidents that affected me especially. One of my classmates in elementary school came to class only every other day. He and his brother had only one pair of shoes between them and they alternated wearing them so they could attend school.
In another incident, a man and wife in an adjacent apartment building who were behind on their rent left early in the morning when their children went to school, seeking any kind of work for the day or even an hour. While they were gone, the landlord legally evicted them, hauling everything in their apartment to the street. Evicted belongings were considered abandoned property without the owners present to guard them. By the time they returned, everything they owned had been taken. They were homeless, penniless and had nothing but the clothes they were wearing.
In another incident, I saw a man pounding his fists into the steel pillars of the Third Avenue elevated trains, blood spurting from his hands, his voice plaintively screaming, “My kids are starving, we got no place to live, may family is dying, won’t anybody help me, please help me!” Those incidents had a lifelong impact on me. I decried an economic system that allowed such degradation of human beings, and I vowed to do whatever I could in the future to prevent that from happening again.
The euphoria of a room of my own was heightened by the prospect of enrolling that fall at age 17 at the University of Delaware, a campus that I had only dreamed about from reading young adult novels about college. My major was clear. I would become a lawyer to help the victims of our economic system.
Home of the Brave flew down to Florida to meet Bob, and capture his life story. For a longer version that covers his post-war years, and includes even more detailed biographical information, catch our extended-cut video here.
My college education was interrupted by World War II. At 18, I was inducted into the Army, and by the time I was 19, I was in combat with the 9th Regiment of the Second Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. A few days after the battle was technically over, I was wounded as our troops pushed back into Belgium and Germany, but not bad enough to be sent home, so I returned to my outfit.
I was wounded again shortly afterward, and this time I was declared unfit for combat and was reassigned to an Army Air Force unit: the Second Air Disarmament Wing, charged with disarming the German air force and capturing German air force personnel. Having been a sportswriter for the Delaware Star while still in college, I was assigned to start a newspaper for my base and other US Army facilities in that part of Bavaria.
In that role on May 27, 1945 I covered a liberation concert held by Holocaust survivors at a makeshift hospital at the Archabbey of St. Ottilien near Landsberg, Germany. Thousands of Holocaust survivors, including those freed from concentration camps, died due to lack of adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical facilities on the part of the American occupation forces in the aftermath of the war in Europe.
I watched with horror the sick and dying survivors. I spoke with the survivor-doctor who had by subterfuge obtained some buildings at the abbey, which had been turned into a hospital for wounded German officers. To save the lives of the rapidly dying survivors, I organized fellow soldiers on my base to obtain food and clothing for the patients at what became known as the Jewish Hospital at St. Ottilien. For example, I borrowed a uniform from one of our officers, removed the insignia so I wouldn’t be accused of impersonating an officer, and with my two years of high school German browbeat the German burgermeisters—the mayors, many the same individuals who served the Nazi regime in the same positions—into providing food the for the survivors.
Our efforts were ecumenical, soldiers of different ethnic and religious backgrounds working together. With winter coming, we had to do more. A fellow GI, Edward Herman, and I decided that if the American people knew of the continued genocide by neglect by the American occupation force, they would do something to remedy the situation. We wrote a long pleading letter, surreptitiously got 800 copies printed, and got fellow soldiers to send them to friends, families, and organizations in the United States, asking for food, clothing and medical supplies. We had no authorization to do so and were certain we would be court-martialed.
Not long afterward, Edward and I received a personal visit from a colonel who said he had a personal message to us from Commanding General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He said the general wanted us to know that we had gone beyond the call of duty and no longer needed to send out more of the accusing letters. He said the general ordered us to stop or he would hold up our upcoming army discharges, and would send us to the Aleutian Islands, noting that would not be good for the frozen feet I had incurred during the harsh winter of the Battle of the Bulge.
We sent out more letters. Ed and I didn’t know what was happening until we received a copy of The New York Times of September 30, 1945, which read “President orders Eisenhower to end new abuse of Jews ... likens our treatment to that of the Nazis.” President Harry S. Truman had received a copy of the letter, ordered an investigation, found our allegations to be true, and censured Eisenhower. We were not court-martialed or otherwise punished. As Ed Herman said, “We’ve got the President of the United States at our backs.”
This experience had a profound impact on the rest of my life. No matter how unimportant one feels they are, no matter how lacking in status and power, when one sees people less fortunate than themselves needing help, they can and should take whatever personal risk necessary to help them.
I write this at 101 years of age. For the past 80 years, I have tried to fulfill my humanist commitments in my professions of theater, journalism, media, public broadcasting, government, academia and in my books, plays, and poetry.
As a government official in Washington, DC during the Vietnam War, I did not hesitate to participate in anti-Vietnam War protests despite the risks to my job status and tenure. As Chair of the Federal Interagency Media Committee, I went against protocol and I effected rules that offered equal grant opportunities for women and minority- and women-led companies. In the early 1960s I was active in civil rights protests and demonstrations in North Carolina. As a college dean and professor in New York, I created and taught courses on hate groups’ use of the media, and on the Holocaust and the growth of Nazism.
With co-author Michael Keith I wrote “Waves of Rancor: Tuning In The Radical Right,” an exposé of hate groups’ use of the media, the most controversial of 12 books selected by President Bill Clinton on his 1999 annual reading list. Implied threats forced me to remove my name from the telephone book, but that didn’t stop threats from reaching me.
During the Era of McCarthyism, in the early 1950s, I lost career opportunities for speaking out. In more recent years my op-eds and letters to the editor, in addition to my public speeches, have drawn real and implied threats and vilification on social media sites, ranging from accusations of senility to dementia. Warning threats included the traditional dead rat at my front door and deliberately punctured tires on my car in my driveway.
But the letters of support—most recently, after my speech at the closing of Alligator Alcatraz, which was recorded and carried on social media and received hundreds of thousands of views—convince me, at age 101, to continue my fight for democracy: Make America a democracy again. I am pleased to have the opportunity to work with organizations such Floridians for Democracy and Home of the Brave.
I opposed the fascists in America and fought them in Europe in World War II. I will continue to fight fascists wherever they are, here or abroad, until I cannot fight any longer.
Dr. Robert L. Hilliard is a World War II veteran, activist, academic, playwright, author, professor, and American hero. He is 101 years old and lives in Florida with his wife.
