The Defense Department has taken down or plans to delete thousands of websites to comply with Donald Trump’s order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work from the federal government, including removing pages dedicated to topics like remembering the Holocaust and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Pages already taken down include an article about the experience of Holocaust survivor Kitty Saks, who later immigrated to the U.S., and an Air Force Academy cadet majoring in history describing his experience taking scholarly visits to concentration camps in Europe, according to a CNN analysis.
Another page, from an Air Force sergeant, mentions the concept of “diversity” explicitly, but in an article for Holocaust Remembrance Week about the importance of protecting religious diversity and stopping discrimination.
“Let us strive to be honest about what things we need to change to ensure that we are not silent bystanders, and therefore, participants in the evil deeds that lead to such devastating crimes against humanity,” the article reads.
Despite the Defense Department deleting pages about religious tolerance and Holocaust remembrance, the Trump administration has made fighting antisemitism a major priority in its opening months.
The White House has threatened to permanently sever financial support to Columbia University unless the school submits to a series of sweeping changes, including by adopting a definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Trump has also spoken in recent months about the importance of Holocaust Remembrance.
“Between 1940 and 1945, more than one million Jews, religious leaders, disabled persons, and other innocent victims were viciously and mercilessly executed in Auschwitz at the hands of the evil Nazi regime — culminating in one of the darkest chapters in human history,” the White House wrote in a statement in January, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. “On this solemn day, America joins the Jewish community, the people of Poland, and the entire world in mourning the lives lost, the souls battered, the heroes forgotten, and the countless men and women who gave their lives for the cause of freedom.”
Other Defense Department takedown targets bear little obvious connection to DEI, including pages about 9/11, veterans suicide prevention, and stopping sexual assault.
Many of the up to 24,000 pages that could be purged were not submitted by individual units but rather identified using automated scripts, according to an email obtained by CNN.
The erased websites have been a continued source of controversy for the Pentagon, including an outcry over eliminating information about Jackie Robinson, who served in the Army in WWII before his boundary-breaking career as a professional baseball player and civil rights activist integrating the major leagues during the era of Jim Crow racial segregation. (The military has since said the page on Robinson was mistakenly taken down.)
Others have taken issue with takedowns like the removal of pages about the Native American code talkers, units that used indigenous languages to pass high-value military communications across the battlefields of WWI and WWII.
“Who could possibly be pleased by an effort to erase the history of a group of native men who were vital to the success of every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II, particularly America’s victory at Iwo Jima,” EJ Montini, a columnist in Arizona, a state with a large Navajo population, wrote in the Arizona Republic.
The Defense Department has defended the changes
“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military,” Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot told The Independent. “It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.”
