Legendary Singer Tony Bennett, Who Helped Liberate a Nazi Concentration Camp, Dies at 96
by Shiryn Ghermezian
Tony Bennett in 2003. Photo: Tom Beetz via Wikimedia Commons
Tony Bennett, the award-winning iconic vocalist whose singing career spanned eight decades, died on Friday morning in New York City at the age of 96, leaving a rich legacy of memories that included his participation in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp near the notorious Dachau death camp as a young US soldier who served during World War II.
“Tony left us today but he was still singing the other day at his piano and his last song was, Because of You, his first #1 hit,” read a post on Bennett’s official Instagram account. “Tony, because of you we have your songs in our heart forever.”
Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016 but still performed and recorded through 2021.
Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Astoria, Queens, New York, on Aug. 3, 1926, to Italian immigrant parents, he began singing as a child and studied music and painting at New York’s High School of Industrial Art.
The I Got Rhythm singer was not Jewish but his daughter, vocalist Antonia Bennett, converted to Judaism in 2013. She married Ronen Helmann, a native Israeli, and together they gave the late singer a Jewish granddaughter named Maya in May 2016.
Bennett was drafted in the US Army at the age of 18 in 1944, and was part of the 255th Regiment that during World War II liberated the Kaufering concentration camp in Landsberg, which was 30 miles south of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
“I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds,” Bennett wrote in his autobiography, titled The Good Life. “Once we took possession of the camp, we immediately got food and water to the survivors, but they had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe that we were there to help them and not to kill them…To our horror we discovered that all of the women and children had been killed long before our arrival and that just the day before, half the remaining survivors had been shot…The whole thing was beyond comprehension.”
He told the Baltimore Jewish Times in an interview in 2018 that his experience in the Army “turned me into a lifelong pacifist and it’s my hope that all wars and violence will become a thing of the past.”
Bennett’s first and only performance in Israel was in 2014 at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv. He was introduced on stage by a recorded voice of Frank Sinatra calling him “the greatest singer in the world today.” The night before his show, he joined Lady Gaga on stage for a surprise guest appearance at her concert in Park Hayarkon.
Bennett’s career as a recording artist started in 1949 and he was one of the biggest singers in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Some of his most popular songs included I Got Rhythm, The Best is Yet to Come, The Shadow of Your Smile and I Left My Heart in San Francisco, the latter of which won him his first Grammys: record of the year and best male solo vocal performance. He had a No. 1 album at age 85, famously dueted on Body and Soul with Amy Winehouse, released a full-length duet album with Diana Krall, recordings with Lady Gaga and did duets with Mariah Carey, Bono and others. His Grammy-winning song Perfectly Frank from 1992 and Steppin’ Out from 1993 were tributes to Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.
His last public appearance was with Lady Gaga for a performance at Radio City Music Hall in August 2021, two months before the release of his last album Love for Sale, which was a follow-up to his 2014 record with Lady Gaga, Cheek to Cheek.
Bennett won 18 Grammy Awards, and a total of 36 nominations, two Emmy Awards and in 2001 received a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006. He made two acting appearances during his lifetime — on the ‘60s detective show 77 Sunset Strip and in The Oscar in 1966.
Bennett was also a civil rights advocate and participated in the historic 50-mile marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Martin Luther King Center gave him their Salute to Greatness Award and his footprint was added to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.
He is survived by his wife Susan Benedetto; his two sons D’Andrea “Danny” Bennett and Daegal “Dae” Bennett, from his first marriage to Patricia Beech; his daughters Johanna Bennett and Antonia Bennett from his marriage to his second spouse, actress Sandra Grant; and nine grandchildren.
