Beyond Belief

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Hearst for his profascism and his antisemitism.10 Ironically, by 1943 the Hearst papers had become one of the strongest advocates outside the ranks of the liberal press of Allied action on behalf of Jews. The Hearst papers carried numerous editorials in support of the demands of Peter Bergson and his followers, a small band of activists who conducted some controversial publicity-oriented activities on behalf of European Jews.

  The news was not a secret, but it faced so many obstacles that it was almost more rational to dismiss it as untrustworthy than to accept it as true. And this is what the press often did. Some reports were never verified enough to assuage the doubts of skeptical reporters and editors. Some editors simply did not even consider plausible accounts of horrors that came from their reporters in the field. The skepticism which greeted these reports was reflected in the way the vast majority of American papers treated the news. They printed it but placed it in obscure places, an action which not only attested to their own ambivalence about the veracity of the news but also created another barrier between information and public understanding and belief. There were even occasions when reporters injected into their reports their own doubts about the reliability of the information they were transmitting. This happened particularly when they related news of massacres, mass murder, and gas chambers. Sigrid Schultz complained about the Nazi tendency to brand any report of killings or brutalities as an “untrue atrocity story, reminiscent of the propaganda campaigns of World War I.” They knew, Schultz observed, that anything labeled propaganda was bound to be disbelieved in America. Until Pearl Harbor many people in the United States read the reports of Nazi atrocities as if they were detective or horror stories, causing some gooseflesh but not to be taken too seriously. Even after Pearl Harbor there were those, including many reporters wary of being duped, who rejected these “tales.” Richard C. Hottelet, who worked for United Press during this period, recently observed in an interview that “sophisticated” people, including many such as himself, who were ardent foes of the Nazis, rejected these stories as creations of “self-serving” parties.12

  It must also be remembered that there was other news of far more central interest and “importance” than what was being done to Jews. A major conflagration was underway, and at times it threatened to involve the world. As soon as Germany crossed the Polish border, news of the persecution of European Jewry began to be crowded out of the press by news of the war. Editorials admitted that the “desperate plight of the civilians” was obscured as a result of the attention paid by the press to the “dramatic news of the mighty clashes between the military forces.”13 As the war progressed—particularly once America entered—the public was understandably far more interested in the entire orbit of war news than it was in reports on the treatment of one particular group, however outrageous that treatment. Ironically, after September 1939 the importance the press accorded the story of the Jews’ persecution diminished even further despite the fact that the treatment being meted out to them increased in severity.

  As the war engulfed ever growing numbers of people, the press subsumed Nazi antisemitic policy under the rubric of general wartime suffering. It soon became evident that millions of innocent civilians would experience terrible privations. Some would suffer because their homes had become battlefields, while others would be forced into slave labor and deported to far-off places. The press correctly recognized that Nazi brutality toward conquered people was severe and that many peoples, particularly those in Eastern Europe, faced an awful fate. For much of the war the press treated the Jews as one of those peoples, one among many. This approach to the Jews’ plight reflected the way the press had often treated Nazi antisemitism in the past. As long as it failed to grasp that antisemitism was fundamental and central to Nazi ideology, it would not catch the signs of approaching deliberate annihilation and would not treat wartime persecution of the Jews as something different and distinct from the Germans’ atrocious treatment of a multitude of other noncombatants. In this regard the press was simply replicating—consciously or not—the entrenched policy of the Allied leadership. The identity of the victims was universalized by the State Department and the British Foreign Office. Allied leaders always referred to “oppressed political” minorities or refugees; sometimes they added the adjective “racial.” With a few exceptions, Allied officials steadfastly refused to refer to Jews as subjects of particularly harsh treatment. Jews were victims, but so were a multitude of others. While it was generally recognized that they might be the first to suffer, whatever happened to them was likely, according to the way the Allies disseminated the information, to happen to many other peoples.14

  Another complex, almost paradoxical situation may have also helped push this news of intensifying persecution and, ultimately, of annihilation into the inner recesses of the paper. As the years passed and the persecution of European Jewry became a familiar topic, many papers increasingly tended to place it within the inner recesses of the paper, treating it as well-known or “old” news, even though they still did not really believe the news.

  Ultimately the most formidable obstacle to the spreading and acceptance of news of the Final Solution was the nature of the information itself. People are naturally inclined to doubt the fantastic and the unprecedented, especially when the story told is an atrocity tale. Had the Germans chosen to enslave and oppress the Jews but not to annihilate them, there would have been fewer doubts about what they were doing. Given the German record since 1933 of brutalities and persecution, people might have eventually believed this news. But because the Nazis chose to do the unprecedented, the reports of their actions were most likely to be rejected as inaccurate. The extreme nature of the news fostered doubts in the minds of victim and bystander. The systematic annihilation of an entire people seemed beyond the realm of the possible. It certainly was beyond the realm of the believable. Both the means of murder—gas—and the size of the victim population—many millions—reinforced the natural barriers of incredulity. In a certain respect these were healthy doubts—the mind’s rebellion against believing that human beings were capable of sinking to such levels of depravity—but they made it easier for the perpetrators to camouflage their plans.

  In sum, Americans who depended on the media for their information were presented with a confused and confusing picture, a picture with many correct but unclear or incomplete details. The way in which the information was relayed enabled many people to categorize it as unverified rumors spread by unreliable sources. The suffering of Jews was often reported as the suffering of Poles, Russians, French, Dutch, and other national groups. The area in Poland to which many of the Jews were being transported was off limits to foreign reporters. But most of all, the idea of an entire people being murdered in gas chambers was unprecedented.

  As shall be demonstrated in the pages that follow, all these barriers to belief resulted in a paradoxical situation: on occasion the Allied press did a better job of suppressing or casting doubt upon the news of the Final Solution than did the Nazis.

  Misery Wholesale

  Within a few weeks after the beginning of hostilities in Europe in September 1939, press reports indicated that the Nazis were intensifying their drive against the Jews. On September 11 Otto Tolischus, who visited the Polish front, noted that the Germans were blaming the resistance they met on the Jews. There were almost immediate reports of a planned “purge” of Jews in Poland and the creation of a “Jewish reserve” there. Early in the fall the New York Times reported that the deportation of Jews was “extending” throughout the German Protectorate and in a detailed page 3 report described the Jews as the “worst sufferers” among the various peoples who were being forcibly moved by the Germans. On November 1, a news summary by the foreign editor of the San Francisco Chronicle carried the headline

  THOUSANDS OF JEWS IN A NEW EXODUS FROM VIENNA TO POLAND

  According to the article “no one seems to know” what their fate would be, but since they were allowed to take virtually nothin
g with them, if they did not find work, they were “expected to starve.” A similarly ominous article appeared on page 3 of the Los Angeles Times.15 By December 1939 reporters in Germany were transmitting “official information” on the “forced migration [of Jews] into a huge concentration camp in what was formerly Poland.” Viennese Jews were being expelled at the rate of 2,000 a week so that on March 1, 1940, Vienna would be free of Jews. Over 150,000 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia were about to be deported, as were the Jews of Teschen and other parts of German-occupied territory. The New Republic described the “human suffering involved [as] . . . beyond the compass of the imagination.”16

  It was not long before reports of the establishment of ghettos and death from disease and starvation were also to be found in the press. Within a few months after the start of the war, the Vatican, the Polish government in exile, and the British government released reports on Nazi brutality, particularly in concentration camps. By this time stories of the horrors of the German camps were generally accepted by the press. In fact, even before the war general acceptance had begun. In April 1939 Time observed that “too many alumni have emerged from concentration camps with the same story to leave any further doubt that sadism and brutality are part & parcel of the concentration camp routine.” In August 1939, when the Munich Illustrated Press released pictures depicting what the Germans claimed were the conditions in the concentration camps, Life dismissed the pictures and the story which accompanied them as a “whitewash.” According to the magazine, conditions in the camps, German claims to the contrary notwithstanding, were so awful that they seemed like an “incredible nightmare invented by malicious lunatics.” When the British released their White Paper on the situation in the camps, the New York Times observed in an editorial that the “essential truth of the sickening story” had “long since been established.” In the fall of 1939 Christian Century, which had demonstrated and would continue to demonstrate an almost sardonic attitude toward stories of atrocities, found its doubts giving way “as report follows report.” The abundant similar reports were too compelling to deny totally, though it was possible to argue, as we shall see, that things were not as bad as reported. At the beginning of 1940, when the Nazis ejected American and other diplomatic personnel from Poland, some papers began to wonder what forms of “dreadful oppression” the Germans wanted to hide.17

  According to Sigrid Schultz, “the war had barely started” when reporters began hearing reports of “German atrocities in invaded countries.” Schultz discovered an easy method to gather information about what was taking place on the eastern front.

  All one had to do was to go to one of the waiting rooms of the railroad stations in eastern Berlin and listen to Black Guards [SS] arriving from or leaving for the front. They seemed to enjoy describing how they had locked Poles and Jews into cellars and then thrown hand grenades through windows left open for the purpose.18

  Even Jews who were not subjected to deportation were living in what Fred Oeschner of United Press described as “complete hopelessness.” By the outbreak of the war Jews in Germany had been

  barred from all profession and trades . . . forbidden to enter restaurants, theaters, cinemas, museums, bathing beaches or any other place of recreation. . . . in the winter, gangs of elderly men and women without proper clothing, shoes or gloves could be seen shoveling snow in subzero temperatures in the streets of German cities. The Jews were given no ration cards for clothing and no permits to buy shoes.19

  But not everyone was convinced. There were still a few papers which tried to dismiss stories of extreme suffering and atrocities as just a device to discredit the other side. They warned that any attempt to use them would be “abortive” because their “history is not good.” This was rarely the picture depicted by Berlin correspondents, but on occasion some among them simply ignored the Jews’ situation or painted it in a benign if not benevolent light. Such was the case when Life’s Berlin correspondent, William D. Bayles, sent the magazine a series of detailed letters on conditions in Germany. In his sole reference to Jews he said that those Jews who had been forced to sell their businesses in the wake of Kristallnacht “came out on top.” Even though they had only received one-third the face value of their property, according to Bayles they were now “mostly out of the country or at least have the money safely put away,” while the “Aryans” who bought their establishments “are now facing bankruptcy.” Bayles wrote the letter in which he said this in November 1939 at the same time that other reporters were describing the severe suffering and destitute condition of German Jews. Bayles ignored the severity of their situation until six weeks later. Crossing the border from Germany into the Netherlands Bayles witnessed—and in an article described—how his fellow passengers who were Jews were physically and verbally abused by German guards and Gestapo agents: at the border men, women, and children were herded into a “windowless shed, without heat, ventilation, toilets or water,” and were required to remain there for twenty-four hours.20

  By early 1940 the news had become grimmer. In March the Chicago Tribune reported that a news “leak” out of Poland indicated that Polish Jews would be forbidden to emigrate, that Jews in camps would not be allowed to leave for countries controlled by the Reich, and that “gradually all Jews are being massed in the Lublin area, the most desolate region in former Poland.” Also, American embassy officials in Berlin told the State Department of the progressively harsher regulations being imposed upon German Jews. They were particularly concerned when in early 1940 Jews from areas of the “old Reich” began to be deported. Embassy officials feared that this “presaged the general removal of Jews to Poland” from significant areas of the Reich. Assistant Secretary of State A. A. Berle, in a memorandum to the Secretary of State, described the deportations as “brutal in the extreme” and recommended that the Department register a protest either by sending a note to the Germans or issuing a press statement.21

  News of this sort prompted some unknowingly prophetic observations, including one by the Buffalo Courier Express which described the Nazis as waging two wars, a conventional one against Britain and France and “one of the basest, most brutal and vicious wars in human history . . . . the war of extermination against the Jewish people of Germany.” The Newark Star Ledger also offered a frighteningly accurate prediction: five and a half million Jews were in “distress,” and many were “doomed to perish.”22

  These papers now understood that many Jews would die as a result of the conditions which they were being forced to endure. But even though they used the terms “extermination,” “annihilation,” and “doomed to perish,” they could not and did not know the full extent of the horror that would soon engulf European Jews. During the entire period of Nazi rule these terms were used to mean different things. During the first years of Nazi rule, when Hitler and his followers threatened that the Jewish community would be “exterminated with fire and sword,” the press generally understood this to mean that the Jewish community as a functioning part of German society would be destroyed: synagogues would no longer exist, Jewish institutions would be disbanded, Jews would be unable to obtain decent jobs that provided a living wage, many Jews would leave the Reich because of the intolerable situation there, and those who remained would eventually die off as a result of extreme poverty and difficult conditions.

  This was what Edgar Ansel Mowrer meant in 1933 when he described the aim of the Nazis’ “barbarous campaign” against the Jews as the “extermination, permanent subjection or voluntary departure of the Jews from Germany.” He knew conditions would be terrible, but he was not predicting the Final Solution; for there was no way he—or any other reporter—could have been prescient enough to know that “extermination” would come to mean a systematic program of annihilation.* As the situation worsened, “extermination” was used in its literal sense: Many would die. But there was a difference in saying that many would die as a result of extreme deprivation or even murder and acknowledging that millions, almost the entire
Jewish population of Europe, would die in systematic massacres and in death factories established specifically to kill them.

  A similar interpretation of the terms “annihilation” and “wiped out” was applied in an article entitled “The Annihilation of German Jewry” by the Berlin correspondent of the British journal The Spectator, who described how as a result of the “ruthless” deportations, the entire Reich and the annexed Polish provinces would be “completely ‘Jew-free’ and Judaism will be completely wiped out.” In 1941, shortly after his return from Europe, H. R. Knickerbocker went a step further in his use of these terms. He predicted that while “perhaps five or six million Jews . . . will ultimately perish” at Nazi hands, they would not be murdered but condemned to a “slow death.” Hitler would not “kill them all at once” because he enjoyed watching them suffer, needed their labor power, and did not want to “outrage what there is left of world opinion.”24 During this period the press used such terms as “extermination” and “perish” to signify the “slow death” of a community, its institutions, and ultimately its people. No one could imagine even in 1941 that it would soon take on an even more diabolical meaning.

  Between the fall of 1940 and the winter of 1941 antisemitic regulations were imposed in all Nazi controlled areas. In October 1940 Marshall Petain, chief of state of Vichy France, announced that Nuremberg-like decrees would also go into effect in unoccupied France. Foreign Jews could now be interned in special camps by local prefects, and Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship. The decrees were widely reported in the press; Time typically described them as “so un-French, so very German in accent that the outside world found it hard to believe they came from the mouth of an old fighter for France . . . Petain.”25