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High-Flying Hero

Tuskegee Airman recounts chilling Holocaust story in The Luft Gangster documentary.

Robin Schwartz
Special to the Jewish News

Photos by Russell Levine

H

is voice still quivers when he
speaks about the fateful morning
of April 29, 1945. Even now, 71
years later, Tuskegee fighter pilot Lt. Col.
Alexander Jefferson remembers the sights,
the sounds and the gut-wrenching emo-
tions of that day like it was yesterday.
Jefferson, 94, a Detroit native and one
of the first African American fighter pilots
in U.S. history, was shot down during
a World War II mission over German-
occupied southern France in 1944 and
held as a prisoner of war for nine long
months. Eventually, General George S.
Patton’s 3rd Army liberated the POW
camp, bringing him one step closer to
freedom and home. But, the rush of excite-
ment quickly turned to horror as Jefferson
and other American soldiers unwittingly
became eyewitnesses to the atrocities of
the Nazi concentration camp, Dachau,
where more than 200,000 people were
imprisoned and 41,500 were murdered,
according to a memorial website.
“We knew they were Jews — but the
background as to why they were there and
why they were being killed, we had no
idea,” Jefferson said, explaining that pris-
oners received no news from the outside
world during their capture. “Whatever you
see. Whatever you’ve seen, whatever you
can think — double it. Horrible … Man’s
inhumanity to man.”
The airman recounts his harrowing
experience in the documentary The Luft
Gangster: Memoirs of a Second-Class Hero,
which was just released on iTunes May 22
and is now available in 60 countries. (“Luft
gangster” or “air gangster” is the term the
Nazis used to describe American pilots
during the war.)
The project was produced and directed
by Michael Rott, 36, and his parents,
Sheldon and Carol Rott, all of West
Bloomfield, through their Ferndale-based
production company Dynasty Media
Network.
“It’s important for us to keep the story
alive because we’re finding there are so
many people who have no idea of what
the history is,” Arthur Green III, says in
the documentary. The late president of the
Detroit Chapter of the Tuskegee Airman
passed away in 2015 before the project was
completed.

U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) pins the Bronze Star Medal on Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson at the Detroit NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner.

‘IT WAS BESHERT’
The Rott family believes their chance
encounter with Lt. Col. Jefferson at Adat
Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills in
2013 and the sequence of events that led to
the making of the 70-minute documentary
were beshert (meant to be). Sheldon Rott
had gone to the synagogue that night to
mark his father’s yahrzeit (death anniver-
sary) and was unaware Jefferson would
be a special guest speaker. After hearing
the Tuskegee Airman’s riveting story, Rott
invited Jefferson to the family’s Ferndale
studio to record an interview with the
hope of preserving the story. The more he
heard, the more he knew the story needed
to be captured and distributed to a wider
audience.
“This is a story where the Civil Rights
Movement meets the Holocaust,” Sheldon
Rott explains. “We started shooting the
interview and the story took on a life of its
own.”
The family became so passionate they
funded the two-and-a-half-year film
project themselves. Jefferson’s story not
only provides an eye-opening account

of the Holocaust, it also paints an ugly
picture of the racism and segregation
African Americans endured here at home.
Jefferson, who was born in Detroit in
November 1921, talks about experiencing
ethnic hatred at an early age. He gradu-
ated from Chadsey High School, which he
describes as “98 percent white” at the time.
“Here’s a man that grew up in a white
neighborhood, had to fight his way
home from school every other day as
a kid, couldn’t get a job because of the
color of his skin, couldn’t get a mortgage
for a house after the war because of the
color of his skin, and the list of domestic
racial abuses goes on and on,” Mike Rott
explains. “You would never know that he
had a single bad day when you talk to him.
Everyone just wants to hug him when they
meet him.”
Jefferson graduated from Clark College
in Atlanta. He volunteered for the Army
Reserves in 1942 when he was rejected
from flight training. While waiting
for deployment, he attended Howard
University in Washington, D.C., before
being selected for the military program at

Tuskegee Army Airfield in Alabama. After
the war, he was a teacher with Detroit
Public Schools for more than 35 years.
“By the time WWII ended, the Tuskegee
Airmen owned the best combat record
escorting B-17 and B-24 bombers over
Germany, Nazi-occupied France, Italy,
etc.,” Rott says. “White bomber crews
began to request them as escorts because
they knew the ‘Red Tails’ were the best
and they were fearless. The significance
of their contribution during the war shat-
tered racist attitudes.”

AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL
The Luft Gangster has received rave
reviews and won several awards follow-
ing screenings in 25 cities nationwide,
most recently at the GI Film Festival in
Washington, D.C., and at two Washington,
D.C., area high schools. From February
to April, it was available for viewing on
American Airlines flights. In May, a por-
tion of the film was shown during the
annual Detroit NAACP Freedom Fund
Dinner where Jefferson was awarded the
Bronze Star Medal for heroic service. In

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10 June 2 • 2016

