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

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  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

  By 1941 the press accepted Nazi persecution of the Jews as a “truism” and an “incontestable fact.” Reporters on the scene recognized that “despite the war,” Germany was intent on continuing to “press its persecutions of the Jews both in the Reich and in German dominated Europe.” An exclusive report in PM, the liberal New York daily, suggested that the “best policy for a Jew in Poland today is neither to be seen nor heard.” Reporters recognized that the treatment of the Jews had been standardized so that it followed a similar pattern in every city.26 In March 1941 an Associated Press story delineated the specific steps entailed in that pattern: first Jews were “barred from professions and public office,” then they were prevented or “discouraged from mixing with other people,” finally they were driven from their businesses, “made to show distinguishing badges and . . . made to dwell in ghetto-like districts.” It could be expected that wherever German forces were in control, Jews would be “segregated” in “hermetically sealed ghettos.” Those Jews not yet deported from the Reich itself received, according to the New York Herald Tribune, “war work but little else.” They could not purchase clothing or fuel, were barred from parks and main streets and forbidden to have social contacts with “Aryan Germans.” A story in the February 15 issue of Illustrated magazine described the future for the “over a million Jews” who had been confined in Polish ghettos as a “gradual doom.” Ghettoization was “but a first step towards their annihilation,” which would result from “illness . . . lack of water and living conditions not adequate for cattle.” In March the Christian Science Monitor printed a map of the Warsaw ghetto and described the segregation of the Jews as reminiscent of “the Middle Ages.” The article carried a stark headline:

  JEWS HAVE NO CHANCE in NAZIS’ ‘NEW ORDER’27

  In early April a reporter for The Saturday Evening Post visited Warsaw’s ghetto, which he described as a “Forbidden City” cut off completely from “the teeming life around it.” The high-ranking Nazi leader who accompanied him claimed that the Jews preferred to live in the ghetto rather than be dispersed all over the city. This was “confirmed,” the author observed somewhat skeptically, by Jews who “lived before last November in comfortable surroundings . . . and had been free to circulate anywhere in Warsaw . . . [who] now live in a crowded room . . . and can leave only on those rare occasions when they obtain special permission.” Nonetheless, they insisted that they “like the new arrangement better” because of the “peace of mind” it afforded them. The editors, obviously fearful that readers might accept this at face value, appended a cautionary note to the beginning of the article. In a conquered country, they warned, “only the conquerors may speak freely to a reporter”; it was, therefore, necessary to “read between the lines.”28

  In mid-June a reporter for PM returned from fifty-four days in the Reich to write that Jews in Germany were forced to work for a pitiful wage which was insufficient to allow for even minimal subsistence. Those who somehow had enough funds to purchase food found that by the time they were allowed to shop—Jews could only enter stores after four in the afternoon—most of the shelves were empty. The reporter categorized life for Jews in the Warsaw ghetto as beyond “human endurance.” It was worse than bombing; “bombing at least gets it over with in a hurry.”29

  But the imposition by Vichy in June 1941 of what the New York Herald Tribune described in its headline as a “final drastic decree” seemed to shock the press more than anything which preceded it. When such news had come from Poland, it was accepted somewhat matter-of-factly. When it came from France, this was not so at all, even though what was done in France was not as severe as in Poland. What had become normal behavior in Germany and Nazi-controlled lands seemed particularly out of place in France. Editorials in papers throughout the United States condemned France’s “collaboration” in passing new laws which were a severe extension of those that had been issued the previous fall and essentially put Jews—foreign and French—“outside the law.” Now local prefects could send a Jew to a concentration camp for “any reason whatever,” and individuals could be interned on the “mere suspicion” of being Jews. When conditions in some of the French concentration camps were publicized in the American and British press, the French, sensitive to this criticism, ordered that they be improved. These improvements were more cosmetic than substantive, and the escalating French war against the Jews continued virtually unabated.30

  As the commencement of the mass murder of European Jews neared, the press had enough information to indicate that many of them were doomed to die from disease, starvation, exposure torture and slave labor. Soon they would also have enough information to know that many were being massacred. But their own nagging doubts and those of their editors back home permeated the writing and publication of the news so that the American public would still have cause to disbelieve.31

  The Beginning of the Endlösung

  On June 22, 1941, German armored units rolled across the border into Russian territory, including that area of Poland previously occupied by Russia. In the wake of the Wehrmacht’s military advance there began another assault of a vastly different nature. The special units in charge of this attack, the Einsatzgruppen (Action Groups), conducted a series of “sweeps” against Jews between the summer of 1941 and late 1942. Together they left well over 1 million Jews dead. This, the first step in the actual murder of European Jewry, lacked any of the technological “advances” subsequently instituted in the death camps. The Nazis’ dissatisfaction with the “inefficient” modus operandi of the Einsatzgruppen led them to seek a different mode of annihilation: death camps and gas chambers.

  Although the Nazis tried to keep the news of these mobile killing units from the outside world, reports of their existence filtered through enemy lines fairly rapidly. The main sources of information were Einsatzgruppen members and soldiers who had participated in or witnessed the massacres. In addition, German civilian personnel who were present transmitted this information back to Germany.32 As early as August 1941 reports of massacres began to appear in the press. By the fall of 1941 news of the killing was widespread enough to have reached some foreign journalists. When they were brought by the Germans on a tour of German-occupied Russia, they told Nazi officials that they were fully aware of the massacres. But they remained cautious, and the reports they transmitted back to the states were often suffused with doubt and incredulity.

  On August 8 AP described the massacre of hundreds of Lvov civilians as an “orgy of murder and rape . . . directed mainly at members of trade unions, workers in public services . . . [and] factory employees.” A note of skepticism was injected into the report with the comment that its source was “communiques based in part on purported stories of persons said to have escaped.” The doubts of the AP may have been exacerbated by the fact that the report of the “orgy” had been released by the Russians. The New York Post treated reports of mass deaths far more factually. In a lengthy and detailed article it told of a Polish White Paper on the “atrocities” committed by the Nazis during the first eighteen months of their rule. The story was, the Post observed, supported by over 200 items of source material, including “scores of affidavits from escaped eyewitnesses,” and told of over 70,000 civilian executions in Poland. Neither of these two reports specified Jews as being among the victims, but other reports soon did.33

  On October 26 the New York Times carried news of the slaying of 15,
000 Jews in Galicia. Details on the “massacres of thousands of Jews deported from Hungary to Galicia and the machine-gunning of more thousands of Galician Jews” by German and Ukrainian soldiers were based on letters reaching Hungary from Galicia and on eyewitness accounts of officers who had been present. According to this news report, those who had not been “massacred” were living in conditions of “widespread” poverty and hunger. On November 13 the New York Journal American published a page 1 (on page 2 in another edition) story on the massacre of Jews in Odessa, where the toll was reportedly 25,000. At the end of the month the same paper carried a report which had come from Moscow on the massacre of 52,000 men, women, and children in Kiev on page 2.34

  Although by the fall of 1941 news of the slaying of Jews had begun to appear, the press generally focused far more attention on Jewish life in Germany and German-occupied Western Europe, very naturally concentrating on what it could see—and in the fall of 1941 it could see quite a bit. In early September, after what the embassy in Berlin described as an “absence of some months,” the Jewish question was “put very prominently back in the public eye” by the Gestapo decree requiring all Jews in Germany and Bohemia and Moravia above the age of six to wear a yellow star. By the end of the month the embassy and the press were correctly predicting that “more radical measures to segregate Jews in Germany” were in the offing.35

  During the months of October and November the news reported was consistently distressing. Throughout the Reich and Western Europe Jews were being arrested, ordered to wear identifying tags, denied their possessions, forced to work at the most menial jobs, and evicted from their homes.36 The most ominous news came in mid-October with the beginning of what United Press described as the “severest anti-Jewish drive in three years.” According to Fred Oeschner, UP bureau chief in Berlin, the first wave of deportations had been somewhat “makeshift,” but “there was nothing halfhearted” about this second wave. From various cities in Western Europe as well as the Reich—including Berlin, where many reporters were stationed—came reports that thousands of Jews “were being dispatched on short notice to ghettos in Poland.” According to United Press, 1,000 or more Jews were being moved every night from Berlin to Poland for incarceration in ghettos and camps. Various reporters, including two from United Press, witnessed how Jews were loaded on trains which then moved eastward. AP reported that a ghetto had been established in Lvov and that 450 Jews had died in Mauthausen, the camp in Austria. Whereas many people in Germany had not yet heard about the mass killings on the Russian front, there was virtually no one in Berlin who, according to Oeschner, “did not have some idea of what was going on.” There was no doubt that foreign correspondents and diplomats stationed in the major cities in Europe knew that Jews by the thousands were being deported.37 Unlike the massacres, which were “purported” and undocumented, these other incidents were witnessed by American reporters stationed in German-occupied Europe. The Chicago Tribune condemned the deportations as a “new savagery.”38

  Through the fall of 1941, reports from various parts of the Reich described the desperate situation. In the wake of the decree that all Jews had to wear a yellow star, a Stockholm paper reported that 200 Jews had committed suicide. Louis Lochner reported that there was “a new wave of antisemitism” in Berlin. Jews had been barred from grocers’ lists and could not buy vegetables, fruit, sweets, canned milk, and many other products. Synagogues were being closed, and all Jewish households due to be evacuated had been ordered to fill out an inventory of all their possessions.39The Jews of Hanover were reported to be living in “cemeteries on the outskirts of the city” because their homes had been requisitioned. Everywhere Jews were described as being “hungry and without adequate shelter.” The Chicago Tribune termed the regulations placed on the remnants of Berlin Jewry a “tribute to the diabolical ingenuity of the Hitler gang.”40 United Press, relying on what it described as “usually reliable sources,” claimed that “a sentence to a concentration camp was the standard punishment” for violation of the decree that Jews must wear a yellow star. Children’s laxity was punished by incarceration of the parents.41 A Free Press News Service correspondent in Bern, Frank Brutto, in a lengthy survey of the conditions facing Jews in Europe, reported that 4,000 Yugoslavian Jews had been left without food and water on an island off the Dalmatian coast. Within a week, Brutto reported, 1,000 were dead.42

  The press did not have to depend on reliable but unnamed sources; it could look directly to the Nazis for information. This had been the case before the war began and continued thereafter. With the exception of the details regarding the death camps and mobile killing units, much of the information reported by the press came from Nazis spokesmen and newspapers. In October 1939 a Nazi “authorized source” had told the press that Hitler was contemplating a “Jewish reservation” in Poland. In March 1940 the New York Times described the manner in which 80,000 Jews in Cracow were “gradually being pushed back to the ghetto, . . . cut off from practically all connections with . . . the [outside] world . . . thrown entirely on their own resources.” At the end of the article, which painted a dismal picture of life under these conditions, the reporter stated that “this is the picture furnished by the official Government General organ” and then, as a means of insinuating that things might even be worse, noted that direct contact was forbidden and therefore the “full scope” was unknown. In August 1940 Associated Press reported that according to Schwarze Korps, the official “mouthpiece of Hitler’s Elite Guard,” a Jew-free Europe was the Nazi aim.43 In the fall of 1941 German newspapers kept the public informed of at least some of the deportations. The Cologne newspaper Kölnische Zeitung reported that all the Jews in Luxembourg had been transported eastward.44

  But officially the Nazis still denied that anything akin to mass murder was underway. Some papers used statistics released by German sources to shed doubt on the Nazi denials of persecution. In April 1940 the Buffalo Courier Express called attention to the jubilant “boasting” of the Scientific Institute of the German Labor Front that the number of Jews in Germany had been reduced by two-thirds since 1933. From a biological perspective, the Institute reported, “the Jewish population in Germany is ‘already dead’ because only about 10 per cent of the men and 7 per cent of the women are of an age at which they can have children.” The Courier Express asked why the Institute report failed to indicate how much of the decrease in population was “due to emigration and how much to death by slow torture in Nazi concentration camps.” The paper denigrated those who branded news of Nazi atrocities as “propaganda,” because the most “imaginative of anti-Nazi propagandists” could not produce “indictments more damning than those which the Nazis have returned against themselves.” A similar Nazi indictment “against themselves” was offered in November 1941 when Hans Frank, governor of the General gouvernement, that part of the Polish interior in which most Jews were concentrated, told the press that “Jews [who] leave Polish ghettoes” would be shot.45

  The Treatment of the News

  Using space allotment and page placement as measures of importance, it is clear that even though much of this news came either from German sources or from eyewitness accounts, its relative news value was not always considered high. While certain reports were prominently placed in the major dailies, often news of significant value was relegated to the depths of the paper. The New York Times carried the reports of “massive arrests” of Jews in Vichy in a twenty-six-line article on page 18 and the announcement that Jews over the age of six had to wear a star on page 14. The New York Journal American placed the announcement of German Jews’ loss of all citizenship and residency rights and further confiscation of their property on page 30.46 The story of a Nazi edict which, in the words of the New York Journal American, “enslave[d] Jews” was on page 8 of that paper and on page 15 of the New York World Telegram.47 The Chicago Tribune placed the news that Jews were forbidden to use the telephone “even for [a] doctor” on the very bottom of page 10. News of an officia
l decree that any Jews caught outside the ghetto which was the “sole living space alloted” to them would be summarily killed was carried on page 5 of the Tribune in a twelve-line story.48 The imposition of “rigid antisemitic laws” in Norway was reported by the New York Journal American on page 32. The death of 450 Dutch Jews in Mauthausen concentration camp appeared in the Baltimore Sun in a thirteen-line article at the bottom of page 10. New York Times editors placed a warning by twenty-six leaders of the Russian Jewish community that if Hitler was not defeated, “wholesale extermination would be the lot of all Jews” on page 5 at the bottom of the page. It ran Slovakia’s decision to “oust” its Jewish people and send them to “concentration centers” on page 18 and Jewish leaders’ predictions that Jews in Poland faced “extinction” as a result of ghetto conditions on page 28. The story of 200 Jewish suicides in Berlin in the wake of the imposition of laws regarding the wearing of the yellow star was on page 8 of the paper.49

  Not all the reports were placed this deep inside the paper. Though they were rarely accorded space on page 1, a number appeared in fairly prominent positions. The New York Herald Tribune story on the “herding” of Russian Jews into ghettos was on page 3, as was the report of new restrictions on German Jews’ ability to earn a living. Economic restrictions on Vichy Jews and the promise of a “Jew-free Reich” by April 1, 1942; were on page 4 of the Herald Tribune.50

  One of the few times that a number of major dailies—including the New York Journal American, New York Herald Tribune, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and San Francisco Chronicle—found a story worthy of page 1 was in early November 1941 when the Reverend Bernard Lichtenberg, dean of St. Hedwig’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Berlin, was arrested for praying for the Jews. The Boston Globe devoted an editorial to Lichtenberg’s “revolt.” Not all papers thought it so important. The Chicago Tribune placed it on page 16 and devoted only twenty-four lines to it.51 The attention paid to Lichtenberg by most of the major papers can, of course, be explained by the locale from which he voiced his protest: Berlin. But generally during these years, whenever the Pope or other leading Christian religious leaders spoke out on the Jews’ behalf or decried the suffering of civilian populations, their comments garnered more attention than a similar story coming from a Jewish or, sometimes, even a government source. This attention may be attributed to the fact that a Christian was protesting what was being done to the Jews and also to the relative rarity of such protests by prominent Christian leaders. Sometimes even Christian protests could not penetrate editorial barriers. In 1944 the prominent publisher and newsman Oswald Garrison Villard complained about the way the New York Times handled a resolution passed by 500 Christian ministers and laymen denouncing the “systematic Nazi destruction of the Jewish people.” Villard said that