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

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Yet while the State Department’s attitude and the fact that Wise was an interested party may have prompted the press to treat his statements in a circumspect fashion, the press often failed to highlight news from other sources. At the same time that Wise made his announcement, the Polish government in exile informed the press that the Nazis had ordered the extermination of half the Jews of Poland by the end of the year and that Jews were being rounded up and either massacred on the spot by an SS “special battalion” characterized by its “utter ruthlessness and inhumanity” or transported to “special camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor” where the “so-called settlers are mass-murdered.” The New York Journal American carried this story on page 2; the Washington Post placed it on page 6 and the New York Times on page 10. The next day Ignacy Schwarzbart amplified this report and said that a million Jews had already been killed. The New York Times headline was graphic:

  SLAIN POLISH JEWS PUT AT A MILLION

  One-third of Number in Whole Country Said to Have Been

  Put to Death by Nazis,

  Abattoir for Deportees

  Mass Electrocutions, Killing by Injection of

  Air Bubbles Described in Reports

  The story described Poland as “a mass grave.” Jews from all over Europe were being transported to the Warsaw ghetto, where they were separated into two groups, “able bodied young and [the rest] . . . who are dispatched eastward to meet sure death.” The article, which included a country-by-country delineation of the Jewish population prior to September 1939 and the population as of the end of 1942, appeared on page 16 next to a report on a truckload of coffee which had been hijacked in New Jersey.56

  On the 26th of November Jewish leaders announced that an international day of mourning would be held and Jews the world over would join in prayer, mourning, and fasting. One of the objectives of the day was to “win the support of the Christian world so that its leaders may intervene and protest the horrible treatment of Jews in Hitler’s Europe.” The Washington Post placed the announcement regarding the day of mourning on the comic page next to a column on contract bridge. The day of mourning itself, however, received fairly sustained coverage in most newspapers.57 The day also prompted editorial comment in the Atlanta Constitution, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times. The New York Times observed that the “homicidal mania of the Nazis has reached its peak, according to evidence in the hands of the State Department.”58 But no daily even considered whether any action was feasible.

  Although the press may have had its doubts about some of Wise’s claims, no paper or journal attacked Wise as did The Christian Century. It described his accusations as “unpleasantly reminiscent of the ‘cadaver factory’ lie which was one of the propaganda triumphs of the First World War” and wondered, even if Wise’s reports were true, “whether any good purpose” was served by making such announcements. Two weeks later, when the Allied governments confirmed the existence of a program for the systematic annihilation of European Jewry, The Christian Century did not acknowledge that it had attacked Wise unfairly and that the Allies were now confirming exactly that which it had previously denounced Wise for making public. Its editorial on the declaration essentially ignored the tragedy and instead praised the “calm tone” of the pronouncement, which demonstrated a “cold determination not to expend in vain outcry one unit of emotional energy.” According to The Christian Century, the right response was “a few straight words to say that it has been entered in the books, and then redoubled action on the . . . fronts.” Even after the Allied statement corroborated Wise’s announcement, The Christian Century still claimed that the State Department “did not support Dr. Wise’s contention.”59

  The Christian Century’s ambivalent response to Jewish suffering continued over the next two years. On a number of occasions in 1943 it unequivocally condemned the Nazis for murdering the Jews and even justified action at the time of the April 1943 Bermuda conference on rescuing refugees to “press . . . home on the British, American and Russian governments [the] demand that something shall be done.” In September 1943 it observed that European Jewry was in a “desperate plight.” But a year later, in September 1944, in spite of the fact that it had acknowledged the mass murders and that the Allies had done so as well, The Christian Century cited the reports of the “alleged killing” at a camp near Lublin of “1,500,000 persons” and pointed out that the “parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked.” On another occasion an article attacked the motives and tactics of some of those who called for concerted action on behalf of the Jews.60

  On December 8, 1942, a delegation of Jewish leaders went to the White House to present the President with a memorandum on the massacres and murders of European Jews. When they left the meeting, Wise, speaking for the group, said that the President was “shocked” at the revelations. There really was no reason for shock. The President had been informed of the massacres on a number of different occasions and had sent a message about them to a meeting held earlier that year in Madison Square Garden. It is possible that Wise used the term “shock” to connote outrage and not surprise. Consequently, Wise’s statement to the press may have misrepresented what occurred at the meeting. According to the notes taken by one of the participants, Roosevelt did not express shock or surprise, but rather acknowledged that the

  government of the United States is very well acquainted with most of the facts you are now bringing to our attention. Unfortunately we have received confirmation from many sources. Representatives of the United States government in Switzerland and other neutral countries have given us proof that confirms the horrors discussed by you.61

  AP’s description of the twenty-page summary report Wise’s group gave the President also conveyed the impression that this was a revelation for Roosevelt. The report was described as having “revealed for the first time that Hitler has officially ordered that all Jews in central Europe be ‘annihilated’ by the end of this year.” Press coverage of the meeting with Roosevelt was not extensive. For example, the New York Times placed it on page 20—news about the President usually appeared in a far more prominent place—but did mention that 2 million had died and 5 million more faced extinction. PM, differing again from other papers, reprinted the report which the delegation gave to the President.62

  Then, on December 17, the eleven Allied nations simultaneously issued their confirmation and condemnation of Hitler’s “bestial policy of cold blooded extermination.” This statement was the official imprimatur that had been awaited. Yet while the New York Times finally found something on this topic worthy of page 1—this was the only Holocaust-related story to appear on page 1 of the Times during the critical period of June through December 1942—in many other papers this statement received even less attention than had been given Wise’s announcement. The San Francisco Examiner put it on page 3 and the Los Angeles Times on page 4. The Washington Post relegated it to page 10, the Los Angeles Examiner to page 16, the New York Herald Tribune to page 17, the New York World Telegram to page 28. The St. Louis Post Dispatch put this story next to the picture of a local woman who had just returned from fourteen months of service as an army nurse in Alaska. The Atlanta Constitution put the story in the lower half of page 2 and only allocated three paragraphs to it, focusing primarily on how punishment would be meted out “not later than the end of the war.”63

  Two days later the London-based Inter-Allied Information Committee released a report describing the German persecution of the Jews as “horror which numbs the mind” and calling Poland “one vast center for murdering Jews by mass shootings, electrocutions and lethal gas poisoning.” The press covered this story in the same restrained fashion it had adhered to since Wise’s November announcement. Once again the same pattern of page placement was evident. The Los Angeles Times put the story on page 2, the Washington Post on page 8, the St. Louis Post Dispatch on page 9, the Los Angeles Examiner on page 22, the New York
Times on page 23, and the New York Herald Tribune on page 30. The Chicago Tribune, which used a headline saying that Poland had become a “Jewish abattoir,” put the story on page 18 next to a marriage announcement. Even now that it was clear that “deportation to the east” meant murder, the news did not evoke any more interest or excitement than it had before, when it might have meant only relocation. A few days after the Inter-Allied report, the Chicago Tribune placed news of Dutch Jews getting “ready for deportation” to the camp at Westerbrook from which they were to be “deported to eastern Europe” on page 7 next to the weather forecast.64

  By the time Newsweek referred to the Allied announcement, ten days after it had been made, it had been reduced to an item of little importance. The magazine briefly mentioned the Allied statement at the end of a page 46 article on the deportation of Oslo’s 1,300 Jews, whom it described as a segment of the 2 million who had been deported and killed, “according to some Jewish sources.” Despite the Allied confirmation, for Newsweek news of the Final Solution was still a Jewish story: not only was it about Jews, but it was news that came primarily from Jews. Time’s reference to the Allied statement was also brief. With but a few exceptions most major magazines did not even mention the Allied declaration. In February 1943 American Mercury published an article by Ben Hecht entitled “The Extermination of the Jews.” In specific and detailed language he described how the Nazis were murdering Jews. That same month Reader’s Digest published a condensation of Hecht’s article.65

  Edward R. Murrow was one of the few journalists who acknowledged the transformation in thinking about the European situation necessitated by the information released since the end of November. On December 13, five days before the Allied declaration, he summed up the change on a CBS broadcast.

  What is happening is this: Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered . . . . The phrase “concentration camps” is obsolete, as out of date as “economic sanctions” or “nonrecognition.” It is now possible to speak only of extermination camps.66

  Another exception was the Christian Science Monitor, which once again adopted a uniquely balanced approach. First, it dismissed any suggestions that stories of the “slaughtering of ‘non-Aryans’ . . . [were] simply a convenient substitute for the atrocity stories of World War One.” The stories were coming from “too many sources and too continuously” to be called atrocity stories. But then it expressed concern that in the aftermath of the war the “peoples that the Nazis have so cruelly wronged” would take out their wrath on Germans who were “innocent of anything worse than passivity under Nazism.”67 It seemed to be a strange time and place—particularly since no victory was in the offing—to worry that Jews and other persecuted people would engage in a vendetta against the Germans.

  Old News

  Between Wise’s initial announcement and the Allied confirmation three weeks later, reports of a murder program had come from Polish leaders, church leaders in England, members of Parliament, the British press, and Jews from Palestine who had been released by the Germans in a prisoner exchange. Jewish leaders had visited Roosevelt. A nationwide day of mourning had been held. The Archbishop of Canterbury had called for rescue action. Yet as is the case with most “shocking” news, the impact of these revelations was temporary.

  Even before the Allied announcement an editorial in the Atlanta Constitution explained the public’s muted reaction to revelations such as those made by Wise regarding the massacre of the Jews. It had simply “gotten used to . . . the atrocities . . . . [Therefore] horrors which blanched the cheek a few years ago are today accepted with a passing word of sympathy.” The Atlanta Constitution demonstrated the truth of its words in its own treatment of the news. The December 17 announcement, though on page 2, was brief and denuded of detail on the killings or the death toll up to that point. On December 28 it put Wise’s call to the Allies to “implement their protest with action” on the lower half of page 16, the obituary page.68

  What the press failed to acknowledge was that this news was different. While the news of the Jews’ persecution was a decade old and the news that thousands of Jews and non-Jews were subjected to inhumane conditions was almost three years old, the fact that the Jews were being systematically annihilated—or, as one British journal put it, “in plain English put to death”—was a revelation. The London Times stressed this point. Though many of the individual pieces of information had already been known for quite a while, only when they were “accumulated from all the occupied countries . . . [was] the plan seen as a whole.”69

  The American press’s treatment of this news was strangely cyclical. It had long thought of the story as unconfirmed rumor or the pleading of special interests. Therefore it reported the news but maintained a skeptical disinterest and treated the information in a circumspect fashion. One of the ways it did so was by relegating it to obscure corners of the paper. Then, once the news—all of it together—was confirmed, the press treated it as an old story, news it had, in the words of the Atlanta Constitution, “gotten used to” and “merely something to be expected from Nazidom.”

  The British Response

  It is instructive once again to contrast the British reaction with the American one. The news of a Nazi program to annihilate the Jews had a profound impact in Britain, which was beset, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury, by a “burning indignation.” Religious and political leaders repeatedly spoke out during this period and refused to let the matter rest. This reaction was the result, in part, of the way the British press treated the topic. On December 4 the London Times, the flagship of the British press and a paper which eschewed fanfare, published an article with a direct and chilling headline:

  NAZI WAR ON JEWS

  DELIBERATE PLAN FOR EXTERMINATION

  In it the paper cited “evidence from Berlin and from Poland itself” which gave the “bleakest possible picture.” It left “no doubt that the German authorities are dealing with Polish Jews more drastically and more savagely than ever before.” According to the article, London had known for several weeks that “the worst of Hitler’s threats was being literally applied.” There were no disclaimers or riders. The London Times article elicited a prompt call from the Archbishop of Canterbury for immediate action. He argued in a letter to the paper that at the very least Britain “might offer to receive here any Jews who are able to escape the clutches of the Nazis.”70*

  On the same day that the Archbishop’s letter appeared in the Times, the Manchester Guardian urged the Allies to issue a joint statement “putting on record their knowledge, and the proofs, of this annihilation policy” and formally indicating that these were “war crimes for which retribution will most surely be exacted.” For the next few weeks the British press, led by these two prominent papers, kept a spotlight on the issue and demanded that something be done. The Manchester Guardian also called on Britain to “lend all aid to the rescue of such Jews as somehow get away.” On December 8 it argued that it was incumbent on the Allies to “find ways to do more than mourn.” The Guardian recommended that the BBC spread the facts and that a program to aid escaping refugees be established. Two days later the Guardian reiterated its call for “practical steps” to be taken in response to the “massacre of the Jews.” It urged that a United Nations conference be convened and that a policy to help Jews reach neutral countries be instituted. Other British papers repeated this demand for action. On December 7 the Times described the terror being inflicted on Jews as a “European pogrom” which had been “carefully prepared.” It had become apparent to the London Times that for many Jews “transportation means death.”72

  British officials soon began to react to this public discussion of the tragedy occurring in Europe. On the following day the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, sent a draft resolution to American Ambassador John Winant and reminded him that there was in England “growing public interest in this question and it is therefore desirable to make our a
ttitude known at the earliest possible moment.” The London Times article was considered noteworthy enough by Winant to be included in a telegram he sent to the Secretary of State on December 7.73 On December 12 the London Times, even while acknowledging that a “prerequisite of real help is victory,” urged that concern be “not so much with retribution as with aid.” At the same time that the American press was still treating this news with faint skepticism and equanimity, if not lassitude, the British press had no doubts that it was true and that action was both necessary and possible.74

  During December the British press “call for action” was echoed by religious and political leaders as well as members of Parliament from all parties. The Bishop of Chichester, one of the most influential Anglican Church leaders, urged that a rescue program be adopted and all steps be taken to grant Jews “temporary refuge.”75The Archbishop of York spoke in the House of Lords on the “appalling outrages” against Jews in Poland and called for retribution against those who are “ordering these massacres” and against the “thousands of underlings who appear to be joyfully and gladly carrying out these crimes.” The London Times believed the Archbishop to have given expression to the “immediate feeling that must be uppermost in every heart.”76