44. Life, August 28, 1944, p. 34.
45. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President Elect, 1890-1952 (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1983), p. 400.
46. Those participating included Julius Ochs Adler, vice president and general manager, New York Times; Malcolm Bingay, editor, Detroit Free Press; Amnon Carter, editor, Fort Worth Star Telegram; Norman Chandler, general manager, Los Angeles Times; William L. Chenery, publisher, Collier’s; E. Z. Dimitman, executive editor, Chicago Sun; John Hearst, publisher of the Hearst papers; Ben Hibbs, editor, Saturday Evening Post; Stanley High, associate editor, Reader’s Digest; Ben McKelway, editor, Washington Star; Glen Nevill, executive editor, New York Daily Mirror; William I. Nichols, editor, This Week Magazine; I. K. Nicholson, president and editor, New Orleans Picayune; Joseph Pulitzer, editor and publisher, St. Louis Post Dispatch; Gideon Seymour, executive editor, Minneapolis Star-Journal; Duke Shoop, Washington correspondent, Kansas City Star; Beverly Smith, associate editor, American Magazine; Walker Stone, editor, Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance; and M. E. Walter, managing editor, Houston Chronicle.
47. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 18, 1945, p. 1 (emphasis added).
48. Miami Herald, April 28, 1945, pp. 1, 2 (emphasis added).
49. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 6 1945, pp. 1,6; Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1945, p. 7; Miami Herald, May 6, 1945, p. 11; New York Journal American, May 6, 1945, p. 5.
50. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 15, 1945; San Francisco Examiner, May 12, 1945.
51. St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 29, 1945, p. 3a; Miami Herald, May 6, 1945, p. 5b.
52. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 6, 1945, p. 1.
53. Senator Barkley, the majority leader of the Senate, did report to the Senate that in Buchenwald Jews had a much higher rate of death than did other prisoners.
54. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 1, 1945, p. 2b.
55. San Francisco Examiner, April 19, 1945, p. 4, May 1, 1945, p. 14 (emphasis added). For other examples of what Hearst papers said, see New York Journal American May 1, 1945, p. 14 and Chicago Herald American, May 1, 1945. Washington Post, April 19, 1945, p. 2.
56. Walker Stone, a columnist with the New York World Telegram, described the inhabitants of Buchenwald and Dachau as including “German citizens, whose only crime was resisting the Nazi political machine, preaching Christianity from German pulpits, or having Jewish blood.” New York World Telegram, May 10, 1945, p. 17 (emphasis added).
57. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 13, 1945, p. 2a.
58. New York Times, April 18, 1945, reprinted in Louis L. Snyder, ed., Masterpieces of War Reporting: The Great Moments of World War II (New York, Julian Messner, 1962), p. 432; Miami Herald, April 21, 1945, p. 1, May 4, 1945, p. 1.
59. New York Sun, May 2, 1945, p. 8; Baltimore Sun, May 1, 1945, p. 2; New York World Telegram, April 30, 1945, p. 1.
60. St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 24, 1945, p. 3a.
61. New York World Telegram, April 30, 1945, p. 2; Percy Knauth, Germany in Defeat (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 32; Time, April 30, 1945, pp. 40, 43.
62. Hilberg, p. 681. As the Allies approached some of the camps, the Germans, in a last macabre act, evacuated the Jewish prisoners in order to keep them from falling into the hands of the liberators. For a map of the route of the death march from Auschwitz to the camps in Germany and the evacuations from these camps as the Americans and British approached, see Martin Gilbert, The Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 222-224. Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1945, pp. 1, 10.
63. Benjamin West, Behavlei Klaia [In the Throes of Destruction] (Tel Aviv, 1963), p. 47, as cited in Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), p. 199.
64. See, for example, New York Herald Tribune, January 7, 1942, p. 1; January 8, 1942, p. 3; St. Louis Post Dispatch, January 7, 1942, p. 1; Laqueur, pp. 69-70.
65. The OSS Department of Research and Analysis called attention to the way the Russians avoided focusing on Jews in a lengthy memorandum entitled “Gaps in the Moscow Statement of Atrocities.” The memorandum emphasized that “non-Aryans” had been consciously omitted from the Russian reports. Laqueur, p. 69.
66. Time, September 11, 1944, p. 36.
67. St. Louis Post Dispatch, January 7, 1942, p. 1; PM, January 7, 1942; Philadelphia Record, January 8, 1942; Providence Evening Bulletin, January 7, 1942; Washington (D.C.) News, January 2, 1942; Washington Times Herald, January 11, 1942.
68. Interview with Henry Shapiro, February 7, 1985.
69. Lawrence, p. 100.
70. Washington Post, March 31, 1944, p. 3; New York Times, May 8, 1944, p. 8.
71. St. Louis Post Dispatch, February 2, 1945, p. 2.
72. Foreign Office papers 371/51185, WR 874, as cited in Gilbert,
Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 337.
73. San Francisco Examiner, May 8, 1945, p. 12; Atlanta Constitution, May 8, 1945, p. 17; New York Sun, May 7, 1945, p. 4; St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 7, 1945, p. 10a; Soviet Monitor, no. 5999, “Special Bulletin: The Oswiecim Murder Camp,” as cited in Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 338.
74. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 337.
75. Leonard Dinnerstein, “The U.S. Army and the Jews: Policies Toward the Displaced Persons After World War II,” American Jewish History, March 1979, pp. 353-366. See also Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
76. The American legation in Bern which first received the report in June did not give it a high priority and delayed transmitting the full text. Wyman believes that had the full report arrived earlier, it would have strengthened rescue efforts. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 324.
77. Virginia Mannon to John Pehle, November 16, 1944, War Refugee Board Records, box 6, Franklin Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.; DS 840.48 Refugees, July 5, 1944. The summary of the report was received by the War Refugee Board in the summer of 1944. The full report was received in October.
78. For a detailed analysis of McCloy’s role including his response to Pehle’s suggestion that camps be bombed, see Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, pp. 238, 248, 256, 303, 326-328.
79. New York Herald Tribune, November 26, 1944.
80. Louisville (Kentucky) Courier Journal, November 26, 1944.
81. Philadelphia Inquirer, November 26, 1944.
82. New York Times, November 26, 1944.
83. Washington Post, November 26, 1944.
84. War Refugee Board, German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington: Executive Office of the President, 1944), preface.
85. New York Herald Tribune, November 26, 1944. The following papers carried the Associated Press dispatch concerning the WRB’s report on November 26, 1944: Baltimore Sun, Washington Star, New York Journal American, Detroit News, St. Louis Globe Democrat, Nashville Tennessean, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Columbia (South Carolina) State, Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times, Bridgeport (Connecticut) Post, Huntington (West Virginia) Herald Advertiser, Macon (Georgia) Telegram News, Buffalo (New York) Courier Express, Jacksonville (Florida) Times-Union, Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, Roanoke (Virginia) Times, Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer, Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegram, Greensboro (North Carolina) News. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette carried it on November 27.
86. Washington Times Herald, November 26, 1944; Louisville Courier Journal, November 26, 1944; Wheeling (West Virginia) News Register, November 26, 1944; New York World Telegram, May 3, 1945, p. 9.
87. Chicago Tribune, November 26, 1944.
88. Elmer Davis to John Pehle, November 23, 1944, War Refugee Board Records, box 6, “German Extermination Camps,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; statement by John Pehle to McGill University Hillel Holocaust Conference, September 22, 1975.
89. Yank, January 28, 1944, p. 9, August 24, 1944, p. 17; Virginia Mannon to John Pehle, November 16, 1944,
War Refugee Board Records, box 6, “German Extermination Camps,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
90. Terkel, p. 283.
91. New York Times, April 28, 1945, p. 6; St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 29, 1945, p. 1; Atlanta Constitution, April 30, 1945, p. 12; Joseph Pulitzer, “A Report to the American People,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 20, 1945, sect. D, p. 1.
92. St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 29, 1945, p. 3a.
93. New York World Telegram, May 8, 1945, p. 13.
94. Denny’s article for New York Times Magazine, reprinted in St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 11, 1945, p. 2c.
95. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 5, 1945, p. 3a. For Julius Ochs Adler’s reaction see the New York Times April 28, 1945, p. 6. Interview with Richard C. Hottelet, December 21, 1984.
96. Miami Herald, April 28, 1945, p. 5B.
97. McKenzie, p. 271.
98. Baltimore Sun, April 20, 1945, p. 12; San Francisco Examiner, April 23, 1945, p. 7.
99. New York Times, May 18, 1942, February 17, 1945.
100. Newsweek, December 4, 1944, p. 59; Chicago Herald American, May 1, 1945; Life, May 7, 1945, pp. 32-37 (emphasis added).
101. Wyman, Abandonment, p. 314.
102. Basler Deutscheszeitung, as quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 1, 1945, p. 2b.
103. Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1945, p. 1.
104. Gilbert, Macmillan Atlas, pp. 215, 223.
105. Miami Herald, April 29, 1945, p. 10.
106. Atlanta Constitution, February 8, 1945, p. 10.
107. Ibid.; Washington Evening Star, July 15, 1944; New York Times, July 8, 1944, p. 10, January 1, 1945; PM, December 18, 1944; Nation, July 15, 1944, p. 58.
108. Christian Century, May 9, 1945, p. 575.
109. San Francisco Examiner, April 23, 1945, p. 7. A similar assessment of the problem was offered by William Ebenstein in 1945. He noted that if a few hundred or even a few thousand people had been killed by the Germans, people would have easily believed, but told that “many millions of Jews and Christians . . . have been systematically burned and slaughtered . . . people naturally refuse to believe it.” William Ebenstein, The German Record: A Political Portrait (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1945), p. 238.
110. Life, October 11, 1943, p. 93. See also Time, September 6, 1943, p. 26.
111. Terkel, p. 466.
112. For a discussion and insightful analysis of a broad range of the diplomatic action and inaction regarding the Holocaust see Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
113. British officials sometimes demonstrated stronger resistance to Jewish requests than did American. In January 1945 an official of the Refugee Department of the Foreign Office, an office which was known to be well informed, wrote that “sources of information are nearly always Jewish whose accounts are only sometimes reliable and not seldom highly colored. One notable tendency in Jewish reports on this problem is to exaggerate the numbers of deportations and deaths.” I. L. Henderson minute, January 11, 1945, PRO FO 371/51134 (WR 89/14/48), as cited in Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1979), p. 178.
114. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, pp. 99, 312; Wyman, Abandonment, p. 266.
115. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), pp. 119-120.
* When a German reporter received such a suggestion, it was an order.
* The German policy on censorship varied. Radio transmissions were severely censored; the printed press sometimes had more freedom. C. Brooks Peters, who was assigned to the Berlin bureau of the New York Times from 1937 through the fall of 1941, recalled that the paper escaped strict censorship because its policy was to phone all its stories to Paris, London, and, after the war began, Switzerland, and phone transmissions were not interfered with. He did not recall any occasion on which the telephone connection was interrupted or cut off. Sometimes, material that was telegraphed to New York did not arrive.31
* When American anti-German sentiment grew more intense, some correspondents scored big successes when they returned home and were immediately invited to join the lecture circuit, interviewed on the radio, and asked to write their memoirs. According to Sigrid Schultz, this put the Nazis in a bit of a “quandary” because an expelled reporter could do them more harm outside of Germany than inside.38
* The writer Katherine Anne Porter, who spent six months in Germany from the fall of 1931 through the winter of 1932, also attended one of Schultz’s evenings, at which she met Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering. Many years later Porter described Schultz, whom she called in an article “Sigrid Something-or other,” as a “treacherous, devious, fiendishly clever and always scheming” ally of Hitler who was trying to secure the Nazi rise to power. She also claimed to have berated Goering for Nazi policies. No evidence exists to substantiate Porter’s description of Schultz or her claims to have delivered a tirade to Goering. Schultz’s articles and columns as well as the testimony of her former colleagues are absolute proof of the falsehood of Porter’s claims about her. Moreover, during this period Porter’s letters to her fiancé included some bitter antisemitic comments. Joan Givner, Porter’s biographer, describes the writer’s activities during her stay in Germany as marked by “slander and malice.”57
* In a taped interview prepared for the Tribune Company’s archives on its foreign correspondents, Sigrid Schultz offered some interesting comments on McCormick’s initial willingness to criticize Nazi Germany, as he did in these articles. She accompanied him during this visit to Germany in 1933. At one point she grew concerned that McCormick was becoming enthralled by the gracious treatment accorded him. Moreover, his military background predisposed him to be sympathetic to the military demeanor of the Germans. At a Nazi rally and celebration in Berlin she sat next to the colonel and watched how mesmerized he was by the military display. “I could see his soldier’s heart throbbing—the way they marched was just absolutely beautiful.” Fearful of the effect of the parade, Nazi military precision, and the hospitality he was being shown would have on him, she turned to the colonel, who insisted that the Tribune was a “respectable . . . family newspaper,” pointed to where the high-ranking Nazi leaders were assembled, and said, “Colonel, the little man there right beside Roehm is his former lover, and his other lover, the new one, is standing right behind there.” Schultz believed that McCormick was willing to criticize the Nazis at this point because of aversion to homosexual behavior and his impression that leading Nazis engaged in it. She believed that subsequently, when Hitler murdered Roehm and those around him, for McCormick back in Chicago “it meant that that nice man [Hitler] had nothing to do with the homosexuals.” This, Schultz believed, made it easier for the Nazis to ultimately win McCormick’s complete sympathies: once the “perversion” was eliminated McCormick’s feelings about the Nazis improved and he was able to see them as simply engaged in fighting communism.79
* The speech was a powerful one—in a letter to his daughter, who was a student at the University of Chicago, Louis Lochner described it as the “best thing I have heard Hitler do.”
** There are numerous examples of Lippmann’s discomfort with his Jewish identity. To honor Lippmann on his seventieth birthday, a group of his colleagues published a collection of essays in his honor. Carl Binger, a well-known psychiatrist and a good friend of Lippmann’s, was invited to contribute an essay on Lippmann’s youth. He agreed to do so but with one condition. He could not mention that Lippmann was a Jew because if he did, Lippmann would never speak to him again.13
*** This was not the first time Lippmann had suggested that Jews provoked antisemitism; he had done so a decade earlier. In fact, in the spring of 1922 Lippmann contributed an article to a special issue of the American Hebrew, in which he openly charged that this was the case. “The Jews are fairly distinct in their physical appearance and in the spelling of their names from the run of the American people . . . . They are,
therefore, conspicuous . . . . sharp trading and blatant vulgarity are more conspicuous in the Jew because he himself is more conspicuous.” Lippmann’s recommendation was that the Jew work to ensure that he not be noticeable. “Because the Jew is more conspicuous he is under all the greater obligation not to practice the vices of our civilization.” Lippmann then attacked nouveaux riches Jews in a tone that reflected the classic attitudes of many wealthy established German Jews who had come to America in the mid-nineteenth century toward the more recent immigrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe. The “rich and vulgar and pretentious Jews of our big American cities are perhaps the greatest misfortune that has ever befallen the Jewish people.” They were, in his opinion, the “real fountain of antisemitism. When they rush about in super-automobiles, bejeweled and furred and painted and overbarbered, when they build themselves French chateaux and Italian pa-lazzi, they stir up the latent hatred against crude wealth in the hands of shallow people; and that hatred diffuses itself.”
Steel notes that the “crudeness” and the “cruelty” of Lippmann’s attacks on his fellow Jews are in marked contrast to the sensitivity he displayed toward other minority groups and those suffering discrimination. It is “inconceivable,” according to Steel, that Lippmann would have written anything similar about the Irish, the Italians, or the blacks, despite the fact that none of these groups was without its own nouveaux riches.14
* Birchall later became somewhat more critical about the Nazis.
* Roehm and the leadership of the Sturmabteilung, or SA (the storm troops), were purged in June 1934 after Roehm had demanded of Hitler that the SA become a part of the German army and eventually be made its central force. Roehm’s interpretation of Nazi ideology was rooted in his populist, antiaristocratic ideas. By this time Hitler was working hard to attract the support of the wealthy upper class and to ensure the loyalty of the Reichswehr (army) leadership, which was composed of Prussian aristocrats. Despite his long-standing relationship with Hitler, Roehm was no longer useful to the party, and on June 30, 1934, he and the SA commanders were murdered.
Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 Page 43
