Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  But it was not only tourists and students who praised conditions in Germany. Americans with business there did so as well. Sometimes this resulted from what the American Consul General in Berlin described as “real pressure” placed on American businessmen and exchange professors by German officials to “send statements which would not give a really correct picture of the situation.”70 When these Americans returned home, they often told their local paper a very different and far more positive story than the one being carried by the news services. The praise by some came of their own volition and they had no ulterior motive; others had an economic motive for praising Germany. Sigrid Schultz claimed that many American businessmen were lured into snapping up “lucrative contracts” proffered by Nazi business interests and then threatened by Nazis that irregularities in these deals would be exposed if they failed to publicly extol Germany.71

  The American business community was impressed by the way in which Hitler was directing Germany’s economic recovery.72 Business Week believed that in terms of economic programs, “in many ways the Hitler administration is paralleling the Roosevelt administration.” By the end of 1934 there was a general consensus in much of the American business community that the recovery in Germany was healthier than in the United States. Germany managed to reduce the number of jobless from 6 million in 1933 to 1.17 million by the summer of 1936. The armament program, road-building projects, and forced sharing of work continued to whittle away at the number of unemployed, so that by 1937 joblessness was not a problem for Germany. The American business world envied the increasingly improving economic conditions enjoyed by the Reich. (By the mid-1930s, however, many business publications, while strongly isolationist, were critical of German economic affairs because of their highly controlled nature. The business press was also disturbed because of the demise of a free press in Germany.)73 There were numerous American firms with extensive business interests in Germany. One American company was making more than half of all the passenger cars in Germany, another was building the ambulances for the Wehrmacht, still another had 20,000 filling stations, and many others had millions of dollars invested in all sorts of plants and equipment. According to Douglas Miller, American Commercial Attaché in Berlin, all these firms were “peculiarly subject to pressure and threats from Nazi quarters.”74

  Contrasts in the Press

  Thus, even as much of the press was telling one story, visitors, businessmen, and German propaganda mills were telling another. But they were not the only ones who related wondrous accounts of life in Germany. The Christian Science Monitor seemed particularly intent on describing life in Germany as “normal and serene.” Praise of Germany’s natural beauty and social order was to be frequently found in its news and editorial columns. In August 1933 a two-part, unsigned series entitled “A Traveler Visits Germany” told of a satisfied, industrious, contented nation whose populace was fully devoted to the Nazis: “The train arrived punctually . . . . traffic was well regulated . . . . An occasional mounted policeman in smart blue uniform was to be seen . . . . street cafes are busy.” Even the infamous Brown Shirts emerged in a benevolent light. They behaved like they were “members of some student corps.” Little seemed amiss: “I have so far found quietness, order and civility.” This traveler found “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.” Doubts were also cast upon the tales of Jewish suffering. The “harrowing stories” of Jews “deprived of their occupations” applied, the reporter assured readers, “only to a small proportion of the members of this . . . community.” Most Jews were “not in any way molested.”75

  Other papers and journals were reporting a strikingly different story. At the same time that the Christian Science Monitor’s traveler was painting a portrait of a Germany peaceful, joyous, on the road to recovery, and above all united behind Hitler, who was bringing to a “dark land a clear light of hope,” Newsweek reported the arrest of 200 Jewish merchants in Nuremberg who were accused of “profiteering,” beatings inflicted on American Jews who were in Berlin, and the closing of Jewish Telegraphic Agency offices in Germany.76 Hamilton Fish Armstrong described the red proclamation affixed to the door of the Jewish research institute, the Berlin Hochschule, and the doors of similar institutions throughout the Reich proclaiming the Jew as the enemy of German thought and culture. By this time the Los Angeles Times had reversed its stand, and now branded Hitler’s denial of antisemitic persecution as “feeble and unconvincing.” The Los Angeles Times carried the harrowing description of how a young German woman was publicly humiliated for spending time with a Jewish man. Her head was shaved clean, and she was forced to march through a hostile crowd wearing a placard stating “I have offered myself to a Jew.” The incident was witnessed by a number of American correspondents including Quentin Reynolds, who was touring the area with Ambassador Dodd’s children. In a series of front-page stories the Los Angeles Times described the “campaign of indignities” against German girls who kept company with Jewish boys. It featured “documentary evidence” of this campaign in the form of a card given to these girls threatening them with violence if they continued this practice.77

  Some papers and journalists who acknowledged that persecution existed still maintained a benevolent attitude toward Nazi Germany. This was particularly the case when their support of Germany had an ideological basis. Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, visited Germany in August 1933 and wrote a series of three articles about what he saw. He found a reign of terror which placed “suspected Communists, members of former opposition parties and all Jews . . . in constant danger.” McCormick’s comments are particularly important in light of the fact that the Tribune considered Hitler a force against communism and supported him as such.78* Even The Christian Century, which had been and would continue to be skeptical about the accuracy of the reports of persecution, momentarily set aside its dubiousness when Paul Hutchinson, an editor of the journal, returned from visiting Germany to report that “the actual brutalities inflicted on Jews, socialists, communists and pacifists have been even more severe than the American press has published.”80

  The Triumph of Doubt

  But these negative assessments of German life did not dispel the doubts of some of those who had not personally witnessed these developments. As late as 1935, when America’s participation in the Olympics was being vigorously debated, some papers opposed the boycott because, they said, the news from Germany regarding the treatment of Jews was unsubstantiated “hearsay” on the basis of which it would be wrong to withdraw. A similar argument was made in the summer of 1935 by the Minneapolis Tribune after AFL President William Green recommended that Americans boycott Germany. Ignoring the numerous eyewitness accounts of events in Germany, it argued that a boycott would mean “involving this country in a dispute about which it has little accurate information.” Earlier that year, in January, an article in Harper’s observed that when it came to press reports of Nazi persecution of Jews “what relation the news we get on the subject bears to the truth cannot be accurately calculated.”81

  By this point in time extensive accounts of the riots and other violent outbreaks in Germany, many of which SS officials had verified, had appeared in the press. Various legal and quasi-legal actions against Jews had been announced by German officials and reported by the German news agency. Nonetheless, there was a feeling in much of the press that America did not really have completely “accurate information” about the persecution of the Jews. There were papers, such as the Philadelphia Record and New York Evening Post, which dismissed German attempts to deny the persecution as “absurd statements.”82 More prevalent, however, was a state of skepticism and confusion about whether things were as bad as reported. Even while they condemned the Nazis’ brutality, editorial boards expressed reservations about the accounts of brutality because they seemed beyond the pale of believability. Initial doubts regarding the veracity of the reports notwithstanding, the abundance of detail and eyewitness accounts constituted strong e
vidence of persecution. Most papers were never totally swayed by German denials and generally agreed that the accounts of what had been perpetrated upon a “defenseless Jewry” were too numerous and similar to believe “the blanket denial” offered by German officials. However, they also seemed never to fully accept the accuracy of the reports.83 Newspaper stories and editorials increasingly echoed the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s assessment that while the reports of persecution, including looting and even murder, might be “somewhat exaggerated,” they nonetheless demanded attention because they were so “uniform in tenor.” The press did not doubt that terrible things were happening, but its belief was a grudging belief, sometimes bordering on disbelief. As one paper expressed it, “when there is so much smoke there must be some fire.”84

  This persistent incredulity would not fade with the passage of time, but would instead come to characterize the American reaction to Nazi persecution. Often this skepticism persisted in the face of detailed information to the contrary. In February 1939, three months after Kristallnacht, Quentin Reynolds, writing in Collier’s, noted that since that pogrom, which had been described in great detail in practically every American paper and magazine, the “plague of hate” against Jews had grown “in intensity every day.” Nonetheless “there are those,” he complained, “in England and in America who shrug complacent shoulders and who say: Oh things can’t be as bad as we hear.’” The truth was, Reynolds observed, the Jews’ plight was “actually much worse than we have heard.”85

  Over the course of the years to 1945 the details would multiply, but the doubts would never be completely erased. By early in the Nazis’ rule a pattern had emerged which would characterize the reaction of the press as well as the public to the entire Nazi persecution. Americans did not doubt that things were difficult for the Jews but seemed reluctant to believe that they were as bad as reporters on the scene claimed. Whether the story was of Jewish judges being dragged from their courtrooms or Jews being rounded up and shot en masse, the news was greeted with both horror and disbelief, condemnation and skepticism.

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  Making Meaning of Events

  As reports of the beatings and legal disenfranchisement of the Jews continued to flow out of Germany, it became increasingly clear that physical and juridical antisemitism had found a secure niche in Nazi Germany. Now that persecution was occurring with frightening regularity, the press sought to explain why it was happening. The events being reported sounded so fantastic that condemnation alone seemed insufficient. The determination to discover “what is behind it” and “what’s it all about” was also characteristic of the press response to Nazi antisemitism. Ironically, the more it sought to explicate, the more it tended to obscure reality.

  Analysis of the explanations offered is illuminating because it is in them, more than in the condemnations, that the press’s perception of what was happening to Jews in Nazi Germany can best be discerned. In a certain respect these explanations shaped the way in which both contemporary analysts and future scholars would understand German behavior. Had the American press and other Western observers understood the central role of antisemitism in Nazi ideology, they would have been less perplexed by the violence, which seemed to run counter to Germany’s intention to win investing nations’ confidence in the Reich. During this period it was common knowledge that Germany wanted “above all things to make a favorable impression on the outside world”; why then, the press wondered, did it allow antisemitic outbreaks to mar its image?1

  Why Antisemitism? Seeking a Rational Explanation

  The press’s confusion was heightened in the summer of 1935 when the quiet of Berlin’s fashionable Kurfürstendamm was shattered as groups of rowdy and destructive Germans—exactly who they were and who instigated their actions remained a matter of contention in the press—stormed up and down the boulevard. They brutally beat up Jews, and all those they assumed were Jews, who were frequenting the famed ice cream parlors and outdoor cafes on the tree-lined avenue or promenading in the cool summer evening breeze. The riots lasted through the evening and were repeated a number of times in the following days.

  Witnessed by summer strollers, foreign correspondents stationed in Berlin, and tourists from various nations, the outbreaks were prominently featured on the front pages and in the editorial columns of the American press, even though they were not the most violent actions to occur since the onset of Nazi rule. World interest was heightened by the fact that unlike earlier violence, these riots took place not in a small town, village, or provincial city, but in the German capital, the seat of the German government. These disruptions could not, therefore, be dismissed as local aberrations or blamed on the excesses of overly zealous provincial storm troop leaders. Observers were particularly perplexed by these events because they occurred during the American debate over participation in the Olympic Games and while the British Minister of Trade was in Berlin negotiating with the Germans. Western commentators assumed that Germany would bar anything that might jeopardize the Games’ success. A strong foreign reaction to these riots could increase the likelihood of a boycott.

  Because they appeared to contravene German objectives, the press was all the more motivated to find a rationale for them. The explanations offered in various editorials for these and other similar incidents fell into a few basic categories. The most commonly accepted motive was that Hitler wished to “divert attention” from domestic problems and to camouflage the steadily worsening economic situation. One editorial argued that by focusing attention on the Jews, the German government could “flimflam on matters of vital concern.”2 “Frenzy . . . [and] hysteria are vented upon minorities,” one paper concluded, to “keep public attention away from the [economic] crisis.”3

  The riots, as well as the many other antisemitic provocations, were also seen as an attempt to unify the German people. The Jews “have always made excellent ‘whipping boys’ . . . and [have] provid[ed] an outlet for a resentment” which otherwise, for “lack of a scapegoat,” might be directed at the government. The Dallas News believed Hitler was “bolstering his position by playing to anti-Jewish sentiment.”4 Similar explanations would be offered by the American press eight years later to explain the deportations of Jews from Germany.

  German antisemitism was also commonly interpreted as a reflection of the country’s dissatisfaction with the Versailles treaty. The Houston Post argued in April 1933 that while “a dictatorship for Germany is regrettable, it was inevitable” because of the peace pact. Though various papers and commentators subscribed to this position, it was argued most persistently by the leading isolationist paper, the Chicago Tribune. If the inequities from Versailles could be rectified, then, the paper contended, Hitler’s diatribes and the internal violence they provoked would be eradicated. The Cincinnati Enquirer echoed this view. These rationalizations and explanations gave Nazi behavior an aura of inevitability. Blaming the persecution on Versailles or on the German balance of payments relieved the Nazis of responsibility, making it appear that they were simply being carried along by events beyond their control. Second, such explanations placed ultimate responsibility for the violence on those who had imposed the treaty on Germany.5

  But external forces were not all that was blamed; the victims were blamed as well. One common interpretation offered during this period, and still heard many years later, was that the Jews had brought this on themselves. The Christian Science Monitor was among those who found Jews, both inside and outside of Germany, responsible—at least in part—for the Reich’s brutality. It suggested that the reports of violence were “exaggerated” by those “inclined towards hysteria,” including reporters and Jews in America and England. In its editorials and commentaries on the April 1, 1933, German boycott of Jewish stores and businesses, the Christian Science Monitor argued that Jewish, not German, excesses needed curbing. The Monitor’s front-page columnist, Rufus Steele, placed the responsibility for the German boycott on foreign Jews’ calls for a boycott of German goods:
this forced the Nazis’ hand and prompted retaliation in the form of the April 1 action, which was a “rebuke to false propaganda about atrocities.” Once again Germans were depicted as responding to a situation that was neither their fault nor their responsibility. The same approach to the boycott was adopted by the New York Herald Tribune and its Berlin correspondent John Elliott. They were convinced that Jewish protests were inflaming the situation. On a number of occasions in March 1933 Elliot argued that Jews were not being persecuted because of their “race,” but because they were “political” opponents of Hitler. Einstein, he contended, was “detested by the Nazis more for his pacifism than for his Jewish blood.” On March 27 the paper carried two front-page stories on the Jews’ situation. One reported Hull’s assurances that the violence had ended, and the other discussed how American Jews were determined to protest conditions in Germany “despite assurances” from Hull and representatives of German Jewry that there was no violence. The impression left by both stories was that American Jews were exacerbating a difficult situation which, according to United States government officials, had been ameliorated. According to the New York Herald Tribune German Jews had “beg[ged]” American Jews to end their protests but the latter had adamantly “refuse[d].” The New York Herald Tribune presented the curtailing of the boycott as dependent on “Jews” ceasing to spread “atrocity tales.” The Literary Digest was noncommittal as to who was most to blame and faulted both Germans and “Jewish sympathizers abroad” for the “double edged sword” of boycotts.