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

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher and editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, anticipated that he would find that many of the reports which had reached the United States—including the descriptions of the horrors found in the camps—were “exaggerations, and largely propaganda,” just like the accounts of the previous war.91 After visiting Buchenwald, he recognized that the reports that had appeared in the American press had been “understatements,” not exaggerations. The Los Angeles Times’s Norman Chandler admitted that now that he had seen the camps, he knew that the reports which had appeared in the American press had not been exaggerations. “Exaggeration, in fact, would be difficult.”92 In a similar vein, Walker Stone, associate editor of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, said that only when he saw the camps did he know that nothing he had “read has been an overstatement.”93 Harold Denny, war correspondent for the New York Times, writing in the New York Times Magazine, acknowledged that his fellow reporters had the same reaction as did the publishers and editors. “Before our invasion of Germany, most of us had deprecated stories of these atrocities as touched up by propaganda.”94 Ben McKelway, editor of the Washington Star, summed up the editors’ conclusions by quoting a G.I. they had encountered. “I always thought they were exaggerating to make us hate the Krauts. Now I know these things are true.” Richard C. Hottelet noted forty years later that he, along with many of his journalistic colleagues, “knew the Nazis had to be defeated and we did not need these kind of stories to convince us of that.” He, along with many of his colleagues, therefore assumed they must be at least partially untrue.95

  Why these doubts? Given the abundance of information that had passed through these individuals’ hands—whether they chose to print it or not—and given the information that had appeared in their own papers, how can one explain such skepticism? In the preceding pages we have explored some of the reasons the press itself offered to justify its failure to believe: its experience with World War I atrocity stories, the American fear of falling prey to propaganda, an Allied policy which hid rather than publicized information regarding Jewish atrocities, the absence of eyewitnesses, and the distrust of information that came from the Russians.

  In addition, among the editors and reporters of the nation’s newspapers and magazines were many Americans who had studied in Germany, were of German ancestry, had toured Germany, or had been prisoners of the Germans during the previous war. To them these tales of horror seemed implausible. After visiting Buchenwald, M. E. Walter, managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, recalled his experience as a prisoner of war in a German camp during World War I.

  By and large [I] had been treated well. The food was poor but so also was the food of the native population. Hence I was somewhat dubious of the [current] horror stories . . . wondering how much exaggeration was in them.96

  Then also, America had been at war, and Americans, beset by many personal problems, worried about the fate of their friends and family in the armed forces. Convinced that war was the “ultimate atrocity” and any concomitant of war a related atrocity, they were not disposed to focus on the travail of one specific group. This was particularly so when the group in question, Jews, seemed always to be lamenting its fate despite the fact that millions of others were suffering. As Vernon McKenzie observed even before the worst of the news was released,

  Is there room in bewildered minds, obsessed by personal problems, to ponder about the fate of remote individuals?97

  For many bystanders, including reporters, editors, and publishers, it may have been psychologically easier to deny the truth than to admit that one was not really moved to act at all.

  There was also something peculiarly American in this reaction. Americans prided themselves on their skepticism. The Baltimore Sun tried to explain how, despite so much evidence, Americans had been able to reject the reports as untrue. “Atrocities? Americans, a sophisticated people, smiled at this idea . . . . When it came to atrocities, seeing, and seeing alone, would be believing, with most Americans.” Kenneth McCaleb also believed the root of the problem was the American persona. “We are from Missouri. We have to be shown.”98

  But the press had been shown. It had been shown by reporters who had been stationed in Germany until 1942 and who had heard numerous reports including those of participants in the persecution of Jews. Sigrid Schultz, for example, sat in the train station listening to returning soldiers describe the massacres on the eastern front. In 1942 UP’s Glen Stadler, who had just returned from Germany, described what was being done to the Jews as an “open hunt.” By 1944 captured soldiers were confessing to atrocities that Harold Denny, the New York Times reporter assigned to the American First Army, called “so wantonly cruel that, without such confirmation, they might have been discounted as propagandist inventions.”99 Reporters had seen places such as Babi Yar, where the soil contained human remains, and Maidanek, where mass graves were visible. The American government had released a documented report on Auschwitz. Yet these editors, publishers, and reporters claimed not to believe what they heard.

  The truth is that much of the press had not rejected as propaganda all that it heard, but it had erected barriers which enabled it to dismiss parts of it. It accepted a portion, often quite grudgingly, and rejected the rest as exaggeration. It adhered to a pattern which I have chosen to call “Yes but.” At first it argued, Yes, bad things may be happening but not as bad as reported. Subsequently it was willing to acknowledge that Yes, many Jews may be victims but not as many as claimed. Yes many may have died, but most probably died as a result of war-related privations and not as a result of having been murdered. Yes, many may have been killed but not in gas chambers. Yes, some Jews may have died in death camps, but so did many other people.

  As this sequence of events progressed, the press seemed willing to believe a bit more, but rarely was it willing to accept the full magnitude of the atrocities. This was as characteristic of the press’s behavior in 1945 as it was in 1933. In 1933 it could not believe that Jews were being indiscriminately beaten up in the streets, and in 1945 it could not believe that they had been singled out to be murdered. When it came to atrocity reports, particularly those concerning the annihilation of the Jewish people, skepticism always tempered belief. By responding in such a fashion, the press obscured the true picture for itself and its readers.

  What Raul Hilberg calls “functional blindness” also protected the press from the full impact of the news. Each time a report confirming some aspect of the Final Solution was released, the press treated it as if it were the first official confirmation. Previous reports and news stories were ignored. In December 1944 Newsweek claimed that the War Refugee Board’s description of Auschwitz constituted the “first time” an American governmental agency had “officially backed up” charges made by Europeans of mass murder. But the United States government had backed up the charges two years earlier, in December 1942. A Chicago Herald American editorial in May 1945 claimed that only “recently” had America become aware of what was going on in Germany. Life made similar claims when the camps were opened.

  For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, Americans have heard charges of German brutality. Made skeptical by World War I “atrocity propaganda,” many people refused to put much faith in stories about the inhuman Nazi treatment of prisoners. Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence as the advancing Allied armies captured camps filled with political prisoners and slave laborers, living and dead.100

  Newsweek, Life, the Chicago Herald American, and a variety of other papers and magazines ignored the fact that over the past twelve years there had been a tremendous amount of “irrefutable evidence,” evidence which they had dismissed as implausible and had placed in obscure corners of the paper or magazine so that readers either missed it or dismissed it. Almost without exception American journalists who visited the camps at the end of the war ignored that fact too.

  But the reporters were, once again, emul
ating government behavior. In May 1945 U.S. Office of Strategic Services officials in Italy received the Auschwitz report, which nearly a year earlier had been released to the press and which had gotten tremendous press attention six months earlier when the War Refugee Board had released it in its entirety. Despite the publicity and attention it had already received Office of Strategic Services officials treated it as if it were a new revelation.101

  A far more honest and accurate appraisal of the situation was offered by the Swiss paper Basler Deutscheszeitung. Despite the American and British “spontaneous wave of almost paralyzing disgust” at the atrocities “discovered” by the advancing Allied troops, in reality

  the world had known before of the atrocities in German concentration camps . . . . However, the human mind did not wish to see these ugly and disturbing facts although for 12 long years fellow men were systematically tortured and killed in cold cruelty.102

  Had the American press been willing to build on the information which had been steadily emerging over the past twelve years, there would have been little reason for “surprise.” But the press was never able to see the full picture, even when it had many, if not all, of the details in hand. It could not admit to itself or to its readers that these stories were the truth. Often, instead of explicitly rejecting the news as exaggerated, it simply put a critically important story on the comic page or next to the weather report. It put on blinders and erected all sorts of barriers which made it more rational for readers to disbelieve than to believe.

  Epilogue: “Facts That Pass Belief”

  We have seen how the reporters, editors, and publishers who visited the camps generally claimed that until that moment they had simply not believed that the stories were true. After their visits any vestiges of doubt had been eradicated. Now they knew such things could happen, but they could not fathom how. Their amazement had, in fact, only increased. In a front-page story in the Baltimore Sun Lee McCardell, the Sunpapers’ war correspondent, voiced his confusion and disorientation after touring a camp.

  You had heard of such things in Nazi Germany. You had heard creditable witnesses describe just such scenes. But now that you were actually confronted with the horror of mass murder, you stared at the bodies and almost doubted your own eyes.

  “Good God!” you said aloud, “Good God!”

  Then you walked down around the corner of two barren, weatherbeaten, wooden barrack buildings. And there in a wooden shed, piled up like so much cordwood, were the naked bodies of more dead men than you cared to count.

  “Good God!” you repeated, “Good God!”

  McCardell’s reaction to what he found at this camp, Ohrdruf, which was far from the worst scene of German atrocities, was similar to that of the American major who first entered the camp:

  “I couldn’t believe it even when I saw it,” Major Scotti said, “I couldn’t believe that I was there looking at such things.”103*

  A similar sense of overwhelming incredulity was expressed by Malcolm Bingay, who in addition to serving as editor of the Detroit Free Press was representing the Knight chain of papers on the press delegation that visited camps in April 1945. He related the terrible consternation that beset hardened and seasoned journalists who no longer doubted that the implausible had been committed:

  I have talked, . . . with endless numbers of war correspondents who have lived at the front throughout the war. Their stories do not differ and always there is a vast wonderment: How creatures, shaped like human beings, can do such things.

  Last night I talked with one of our correspondents, Jack Bell, one of the most worldly wise and experienced reporters I have ever known . . . . “Bing,” he exploded with sudden vehemence, “it is the damndest, craziest, most insane thing that has ever happened to the world. You think you are awakening from a nightmare and then realize that you have not been sleeping. That what you see has actually happened—and is happening.”

  Though Bingay and his colleagues talked “far into the night” in their quest for some explanation, they ultimately concluded there was none, for this was the “maze of madness.”105

  Now that there was no longer room for doubt, various papers sought to explain to themselves as well as to their readers why they had been so filled with doubts. One theme was repeated in editorial after editorial. It was the same answer Bingay and his colleagues offered one another: this was a “maze of madness.” The New York Times described the news of “the cold-blooded extermination of an unarmed people” as “facts that pass belief.” Even before the camps were opened and the full horror known, the Atlanta Constitution argued that the “horror [was] too fantastic for belief.”

  We know, logically, the stories of Nazi death camps, of wholesale slaughter of helpless captives are true, [but] . . . we cannot realize in our hearts they actually happened.106

  This, the Atlanta Constitution claimed, was why “decent Americans”—its staff and editors included—had not believed. The Washington Evening Star wondered how could “the enormity of the thing be made to seem more than some wild nighmarish imagining?”107

  The most outspoken skeptics were quick to use this line of reasoning to excuse their behavior. When the camps were opened, The Christian Century, which had so often in the past deprecated both the reports of atrocities and those who reported them, sought to excuse—in words laden with pious contrition—its behavior by claiming that the fantastic nature of the news had compelled it to disbelieve.

  We have found it hard to believe that the reports from the Nazi concentration camps could be true. Almost desperately we have tried to think they must be widely exaggerated. Perhaps they were products of the fevered brains of prisoners who were out for revenge. Or perhaps they were just more atrocity-mongering, like the cadaver factory story of the last war. But such puny barricades cannot stand up against the terrible facts.108

  This explanation, even when offered by The Christian Century, cannot be totally discounted. The magnitude of the horror was unfathomable. The tales of horror beggared the imagination. They were just “too inconceivably terrible.”109 This was certainly a critical factor in allowing the press to suspend belief. There were many failures in America’s behavior during this period, and a failure of the imagination was one of them.

  But there is a problem with explaining or excusing the press treatment of this news by relying on the fact that this was a story which was “beyond belief.” While the unprecedented nature of this news made it easier, particularly at the outset, to discount the news, by the time of the Bermuda conference in 1943 and certainly by the time of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in 1944 even the most dubious had good reason to know that terrible things were underway. Numerous eyewitness accounts which corroborated one another had been provided by independent sources. Towns, villages, and ghettos which had once housed millions now stood empty. The underground had transmitted documentation regarding the freight trains loaded with human cargo which rolled into the death camps on one day and rolled out shortly thereafter, only to be followed by other trains bearing a similar cargo. Where could these people be going? Where were the inhabitants of the towns and villages? Had they simply disappeared? There was only one possible answer to these questions. And most members of the press—when they stopped to consider the matter—knew it.

  Given the amount of information which reached them, no responsible member of the press should have dismissed this news of the annihilation of a people as propaganda, and the fact is that few did. In the preceding pages we have seen numerous examples of papers and journals acknowledging that millions were being killed. By the latter stages of the war virtually every major American daily had acknowledged that many people, Jews in particular, were being murdered. They lamented what was happening, condemned the perpetrators, and then returned to their practice of burying the information.

  There was, therefore, something disingenuous about the claims of reporters and editors at the end of the war not to have known until the camps were open. They may not hav
e known just how bad things were, but they knew they were quite bad.* It seems as if these publishers, editors, and reporters protested a bit too much. Why their claims to have doubted? Why their protestations of ignorance? They may have instinctively known that in a situation such as this, doubts are far more easily explained than apathy; disbelief is more readily understood than dispassion. They could rationalize and justify their doubts, but they could not justify the equanimity with which they responded to the news of the tragedy. The American press may not have believed everything that was reported, but it certainly believed a great deal. And therein lies the real question regarding the press reaction to the persecution of European Jewry. Why, given what it did believe, did most of the press react so dispassionately?

  The dispassion, if not indifference, of most of the press becomes all the more noteworthy when it is compared to the behavior of publications such as the New York Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Commonweal, and PM and journalists such as Dorothy Thompson, William Shirer, Arthur Koestler, Sigrid Schultz, Freda Kirchwey, I. F. Stone, Alexander Uhl, Max Lerner, Henry Shapiro, W. Randolph Hearst, and a few others. They were able to surmount the obstacles posed by World War I atrocity stories, absence of impartial eyewitnesses, German obfuscation, and the unprecedented nature of the tragedy. They had no more information than the rest of their colleagues. In fact, some of them depended on reports in other major dailies for their information. One cannot ignore the fact that many publications and a disproportionately high number of the reporters were associated with politically liberal philosophy.* But this alone cannot explain their behavior. The real difference between these publications and journalists and the vast majority of the rest of the press is not between belief and disbelief, but between action and inaction, passion and equanimity. They not only believed what was being reported but refused to accept it as inevitable. They were convinced that the Allies could do something if they would stop behaving as if “the Jews were expendable.”112 They did not accept the position that nothing could be done and therefore there was no point in even talking about it.