American crooner and jazz singer Tony Bennett has died at the age of 96.
Bennett, whose career spanned seven decades, released more than 70 albums which won him a host of Grammys and a lifetime achievement award.
But the American musical icon, who became the torchbearer for the Great American Songbook, left behind another important legacy.
Bennett, who served in the US army during World War II, helped to liberate the notorious Dachau death camp in 1944.
Dachau, named after the town just outside Munich, was the first Nazi concentration camp to open in March 1933 – just two months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. It was to become the model for the 44,000 camps and incarceration sites that followed.
Bennett wrote in his autobiography, titled The Good Life, of the moment: “I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds.
: Tony Bennett in the US army (Photo: TonyBennett.com)
“Once we took possession of the camp, we immediately got food and water to the survivors, but they had been brutalised 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.”
In an interview in 2018 with the Baltimore Jewish Times, he said 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.”
Raised in an era when big bands defined US pop music, Bennett achieved an improbable second act when he started winning over young audiences in the 1990s - not by reinventing himself but by demonstrating his sheer joy in belting out the standards.
He had started his career with the recording of the film song "Because of You" in 1951, Bennett sang dozens of hits including "Rags to Riches," "Stranger in Paradise" and, in what would become his signature tune, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," which landed him two of his career's 19 Grammy Awards.
Tony Bennett with Lady Gaga (Photo: Getty)
And then at age 88, Bennett in 2014 became the oldest person ever to reach number one on the US album sales chart through a collection of duets with Lady Gaga - who became his friend and touring companion but only one of a long list of younger stars who rushed to work with the singing great.
He retired from performing in 2021 after revealing he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2016.
Bennett was born in Queens, New York, in 1926, the grandson of immigrants from the impoverished Italian province of Calabria.
