When visitors and local researchers in the Netherlands realized earlier last month that two panels honoring Black American soldiers who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis had disappeared from the U.S. military cemetery at Margraten, the reaction was swift.
Local officials demanded explanations, historians raised concerns, and the story quickly spread through Dutch and international media. The country’s leading Holocaust museums and World War II memorial centers issued a joint letter urging the United States to restore the displays, and more than 30 members of the U.S. Congress sent their own letter seeking answers.
But the explanations publicly offered were only partial. The American Battle Monuments Commission, which manages Margraten and all overseas U.S. military cemeteries, said the exhibits were simply part of a routine rotation in a limited visitor-center space. Officials did not directly address why one of the removed panels — the one explaining that the U.S. Army was segregated during World War II and describing the racism Black soldiers faced at home — had been taken down.
Now, internal emails obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal, for the first time, how the decision unfolded inside the agency. They show that the head of the monuments commission at the time, Charles Djou, was closely monitoring a flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump after his return to the White House.
The records indicate that Djou hoped to keep his small agency out of Trump’s crosshairs and moved quickly to avoid attracting negative attention from the new administration.
On March 19, the day Trump signed an executive order banning foreign-facing agencies from promoting what he called “discriminatory equity ideology,” Djou instructed his staff to ensure the monuments commission was in full compliance, even though, he noted, the order didn’t specifically apply to the agency.
Under the subject line, “Foreign DEI,” Djou asked whether the agency’s internal databases cataloging fallen African-American and Native American troops could now pose a problem, and whether any displays at overseas visitor centers might “get us in trouble.”
One exhibit in particular drew his concern: a panel at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial, where more than 8,000 Americans who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis are buried. Installed the previous year, the panel explained that the U.S. military was segregated during World War II and highlighted the Black troops who fought both the Germans abroad and racism at home.
A senior staffer replied that he had already scrubbed the agency’s website of potentially noncompliant material and warned that the Margraten panel was indeed “a problem.” Djou’s deputy, Robert Dalessandro, went further: “I agree on the Netherlands. That panel should go. Frankly, it never should have been there in the first place.”
Djou ordered the panel removed “to avoid raising any ire of the administration.” In a follow-up email, he suggested keeping it in storage at least until “a new admin in 2029.”
Former U.S. Rep. Charles Djou, left, participates in a mock swearing-in ceremony with then-Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi, right, alongside his wife and daughters, May 25, 2010 in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The proactive maneuvering reflected the atmosphere of the moment, as Trump overseers replaced agency heads and purged federal agencies of perceived ideological disloyalty. And Djou may have felt especially vulnerable. He was not just a holdover from the previous administration — he was a former Republican who had publicly criticized Trump for years and ultimately endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.
But Djou’s efforts to comply with the administration’s agenda didn’t save him. Just weeks after the panel came down, Djou was out of the job.
“We had a secretary who was appointed by Biden, and fearful that he was going to lose his job, so he over-complied whenever he could, so he didn’t draw attention, and that’s just a fact, and that was a problem,” Dalessandro, who became the acting head of the agency after Djou’s departure, said in an interview.
Djou didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The American Battle Monuments Commission released a statement acknowledging the reason for the removal of the panel that emerged from the internal emails.
“The Netherlands American Cemetery, with its singular mission to honor those who fell in combat and are buried and memorialized there, is not the appropriate venue for interpreting or debating broader societal issues, however real and significant those issues were and are,” the agency said in a written statement.
The agency added, “This decision does not diminish the essential role African American soldiers played in the war effort, nor does it overlook the challenges they endured at home.”
Dalessandro asked to add context to the email in which he appeared to agree with Djou about removing the panel. He clarified that his opposition was not to the panel’s message, but because it featured Jefferson Wiggins, a servicemember who was not interred at the cemetery. Wiggins is connected to the site because he helped dig the graves.
“We have 10,000 service members either buried or memorialized at that cemetery, of which Wiggins is not one,” Dalessandro said. “He lived through the war.”
Dalessandro added, “I do not lessen the fact that he served. I applaud that, but I have a problem when it is our critical mission to tell the stories of those memorialized or interred in the cemetery, and we stray from that mission. It had nothing to do with African Americans. I wouldn’t care what race, color, creed that guy was.”
Janice Wiggins, the widow of the grave digger featured in the display, said the agency’s decision felt like an erasure. She noted that the panels were created only after months of lobbying and were always intended as a permanent commemoration, not a rotating exhibit.
“The removal of these panels and all reference to Black soldiers is more than just disrespectful,” she said in a statement. “It is insulting to the Black liberators who served and to the legacies their families cherish.”
Critics of the decision were already operating under the assumption that there was more to the removal of the pattern than a routine curatorial update.
Ken Greenberg, national executive director of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, said the decision sets a dangerous precedent.
“Removing history is wrong,” he said in an interview. “Are you trying to erase what these Black service members did, or hide it, or banish it? That’s just wrong.”
The cemetery at Margraten also holds particular significance for Jewish veterans. It is the burial site of Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose, the highest-ranking Jewish American officer killed in World War II and one of the U.S. Army’s most respected armored commanders. Rose, the Denver-born son of a rabbi, is believed by historians to have listed himself as Protestant during his military service to avoid antisemitic discrimination that was common at the time. He is commemorated with a monument outside the Colorado State Capitol and by Denver’s Rose Medical Center.
A painting of Major General Maurice Rose along with two copies of the new monument are placed on a table during a commemorative celebration at History Colorado on April 16, 2023 in Denver, Colorado. (Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
A coalition of Dutch World War II museums, including the Anne Frank House, sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador urging intervention after learning the panels had been removed, arguing that erasing the role of African Americans from the liberation narrative is a serious omission.
“Speaking on behalf of the museums and memorial centers in the Netherlands, we value an inclusive account of the liberation, and if there is any political interference in how the Second World War is represented, we strongly object,” said Liesbeth Bijvoet, an official with the Jewish Cultural Quarter, a museum complex in Amsterdam dedicated to Jewish history, culture, and the Holocaust.
There is a reason the removal set off such alarm among institutions devoted to Holocaust memory, according to Kees Ribbens, a senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In recent decades, museums and memorial centers in the Netherlands have worked to move beyond what Kees called “black-and-white” narratives that dominated the immediate postwar years, developing exhibitions that confront Dutch collaboration, passivity, and the full multicultural dimensions of the war — including the long-overlooked presence of Black American soldiers at Margraten.
Ribbens said that erasing those soldiers from the story feels like a retreat to an older, simplified understanding of World War II.
“Many people were disappointed, if not outraged, because it very much feels like history is being rewritten, but not in a way that creates better understanding,” Ribbens said, adding that removing the panels signals “a push back to a former period,” as if the role of African-American troops were once again something to be denied or forgotten.
Even some who share the Trump administration’s concerns about the diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, framework are critical of the panels’ removal.
David Bernstein is the founder of the North American Values Institute, one of the most prominent Jewish critics of DEI, and the author of a book called “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.”
“The effort to remove recognition of Black military participation has little to do with ending DEI even if it is framed as such by government officials,” Bernstein said.
He believes the move reflects a misguided push for color-blindness that erases essential truths. While he argues that DEI often imposes an ideological lens that fuels division, Bernstein said institutions can reject those practices without abandoning a fuller account of World War II — including racism in the ranks and the contributions of Black troops.
“Jewish people have a special obligation to remember and tell stories about oppression, that of our own and others,” he said. “We know the dangers of extinguishing inconvenient memories and sanitizing history.”
Andrew Lapin contributed reporting.
