Beyond Belief

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  it was news and it was eminently fit to print but it was given only a few lines by the Times and buried inconspicuously on page seven. A similar happening [on another occasion] was carefully interred on page seventeen.

  Villard attributed this to the paper’s “unfortunate trait” of trying to avoid appearing as “a vigorous defender” of the Jews.52*

  By the end of October 1941 Louis Lochner was reporting that the total elimination of Jews from European life was “fixed German policy” and that Hitler’s 1939 promise to render the Reich free of Jews was being realized. Nazi-like policies had been instituted in Roumania, and several times a week transports “start eastward with Jews from the Rhineland and Westphalia, Berlin, Prague or Vienna.” The deportees’ fate upon reaching the east was, Lochner observed with a note of real foreboding, unknown. That it would be extremely difficult was accepted without question.53 Relying on reports such as those dispatched by Lochner, the Springfield News Sun predicted that the Nazis have “ominous plans for them [the Jews] when the time comes.”54 A similar sense of foreboding—but not surprise—was evidenced by Frank Brutto of the Free Press News Service when he observed that “Nazi blueprints of the new order have no provision in them for the Jew except ghettos, exile, proscription. Adolf Hitler has more than said it. . . . Nearly everyday, somewhere, new action is taken against them.”55 That “ghettos, exile, proscription” awaited the Jews there was little question. The process of segregation was being carried out on a systematic basis. Antisemitism had, it was noted, “inevitably followed close behind the German armies.” No one disputed this conclusion. Early in November 1941 the Associated Press reported that the Jewish residents of Lvov had been ordered to move into a ghetto within the month.56

  In late November reports of deportations were augmented with additional stories regarding massacres and tortures. The New York Herald Tribune chronicled the treatment of the Jews in occupied parts of Russia. Regarding the deportations it had no doubts: “According to reliable reports” which were subject to a “careful check,” 20,000 Jews had been “deported” to the Pinsk marshes. It quoted from a poignant letter sent by a Jewish woman in Vienna to her relatives immediately prior to her deportation: “everything is too late now. We bid you farewell, trusting that we shall see you again in the course of our life. Please take care of our children and tell them to accept things as they are.” But although by now the paper had received enough news to convince it that the reports of deportations and severe deprivation were reliable, when it came to discussing the massacres the Herald Tribune took a more restrained and skeptical stance. Using a reportorial style that would become virtually standard for stories on the mass murder of Jews, the paper distanced itself from the information and became the neutral transmitter. In the final paragraph of the news story it added, almost as an afterthought, that “some reports received here from Central Europe speak of massacres of Jews by Germans in the occupied part of Russia.” The number of Jews killed in Kiev “has been put as high as 52,000.”57 Apparently, the news of massacres was open to question, though the reports of brutality and slave labor were not, even though they came from similar sources.

  By this time there were some news stories regarding the death of multitudes which were not skeptical in tone, but they were the minority. In December 1941, writing in the New York Sun, the columnist George Sokolsky singled out the Jews when he described the Nazis’ “efficient process of murder.” He predicted that by the end of the war half of the 8 million Jews under Nazi control might well be dead.58 Even the New York Herald Tribune, which had demonstrated a lack of complete faith in the news of massacres, observed in an editorial at the beginning of December that the reports of mistreatment of Jews were no longer news—what was news was the “sheer mass” of those who had died. The fate reserved for the Jews was described by the New York Herald Tribune as “worse than a status of serfdom—it is nothing less than systematic extermination.”59 The Hearst papers described what the Nazis were doing as the “attempted extermination of an ancient and cultured race.”60 In a lengthy story which covered almost an entire page, the Christian Science Monitor noted that the “only purpose behind the ruthless treatment [of the Jews] appears to be the complete extermination of the race.” What was being spoken of was no longer just the destruction of institutions and organized communal life. “Extermination” now meant the death of multitudes as a result of living “destitute and helpless” in the ghettos of Poland and the wastelands of the Ukraine.61Jewish leaders also recognized the increased severity of the situation. Dr. Henry Shoskes, a prominent Polish Jew who had come to the United States at the beginning of the war, explained to reporters in 1942 that the Nazis created conditions in the ghettos which were so severe that Jews were “doomed to annihilation.”62By early 1942 it was clear that Jews would die not only because of terrible conditions but also as a result of massacres. But what the press did not yet know—and could not yet know—was that annihilation would not be haphazard but that this killing would culminate in a systematic program using “modern” scientific methods and whose victims would include millions of Jews from every corner of the European continent.

  While the ultimate meaning of “extermination” would not be fully divulged until the latter half of 1942, journalists, particularly those in Germany, were increasingly cognizant of the changing nature of the situation. Information was available from too many sources to be easily denied. By early summer additional evidence would be available to prove that “extermination” had to be interpreted in its most terrible sense, that what was happening was even worse than had been previously imagined, and that the Nazis were no longer just persecuting the Jews or allowing them to die of starvation, but were murdering them. Despite the fact that these accounts of a systematic program of intentional and deliberate annihilation had been preceded by so much other information, they would find particularly formidable barriers in their path.

  8

  Official Confirmation

  In late spring 1942, the American correspondents who had been in Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor were exchanged for Axis nationals stranded in the United States. These reporters returned to the United States with additional details on the mass murders which had occurred in Poland and Russia. Their descriptions of events were explicit and graphic. Glen Stadler, UP correspondent in Germany, described what had happened to Jews in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania as an “open hunt.” Some of the reporters estimated that more than 400,000 had already been killed by Hitler’s “new order,” including “upward of 100,000 [Jews who] met death in Baltic states alone, and more than double that many [who] have been executed in Western Russia.”1 Joseph Grigg, also of UP, believed that the number of Jewish victims had reached 200,000.

  Thousands lie in unmarked graves, many in mass graves they were forced to dig before the firing squads of S.S. [Schützstaffel or Defense Corps] troops cut them down . . . . One of the biggest known mass slaughters occurred in Latvia in the summer of 1941 when, responsible Nazi sources admitted, 56,000 men, women and children were killed by S.S. troops and Latvian irregulars. This slaughter went on for days. There was even an official German newsreel of squads shooting Jews in the streets of Riga . . . . In Lithuania about 30,000 Jews, according to most reliable estimates, were killed by special “cleanup” squads brought from Poland with the knowledge and approval of the German civil administration. The entire Jewish population of many towns and villages was driven into the country, forced to dig graves and then machine gunned. In one city alone, more than 8,000 were killed . . . . The slaughter in Poland was horrible, with 80,000 killed . . . a high percentage of [them were] Jews. The mass grave technique was used there too . . . . One German rifleman boasted to correspondents that he had killed thirty seven in one night, picking them off as a hunter does rabbits. Rumanians were even less reticent in boasting of their slaughters of Jews.

  The repatriated reporters did not just describe how Jews had been killed, but some made it clear that they under
stood Hitler’s plans for the Jews. Grigg noted that when the war broke out, Hitler had declared that it would result in the destruction of the Jews, and “those of us who lived in Germany know that he and his agents have done everything to make the prophecy come true.”2

  In addition to these news reports many of the correspondents immediately published accounts of their experiences, discussing not only their experiences in Germany but also what the Germans were doing to the Jews. They worked on the books during the six months they were “imprisoned.” One of the most detailed accounts was published by United Press correspondent Frederick Oeschner, who believed that the full number of Jews “slaughtered by Nazi execution squads between the outbreak of war and spring, 1942” would never be precisely known but estimated that it was at least 200,000. Wallace Duel of the Chicago Daily News described the mass graves and the bonfires which were built in order to dispose of the bodies. Louis Lochner, whose account did not refer to the mass murder, did describe the deportations and said they constituted one of the “darkest blots on the Nazi escutcheon.”3

  As part of an extensive series on his experiences in Germany, this veteran AP reporter graphically told how “Hitler [was] still tightening screws on Jews in all lands where Nazis rule.” The treatment meted out was “more severe than even that specified in [the] Nuremberg laws.” Those Jews who had not yet been deported to Poland in “the most primitive” conditions discovered that the “plain fact is that the Jew stands beyond the pale of any law.” According to Lochner, anything the Nazis wished to do to the Jews could be done. He made a point of noting that “decent” Germans were appalled by these reports and did whatever they could to ease the Jews’ situation, including very seriously risking their own safety.4 Though Lochner stressed the severity of the conditions facing Jews both when he was released and again in September, when he was interviewed by CBS radio, he did not make specific mention of an extermination or mass murder program.5

  An American citizen who had been caught in Poland when America entered the war was also released with the reporters. In a widely syndicated INS series he acknowledged that Polish suffering was great, but “whatever is suffered by the general population in Poland it is not as bad as the fate of those poor unfortunates who live in the Jewish ghettos.”6

  Meanwhile additional ominous signs appeared on the horizon. Several articles in the press indicated an increasingly frightening situation. On June 13 Goebbels’s threat to carry out “mass extermination of Jews in reprisal for the Allied air bombings” was reported by the press.7 A few days later the Los Angeles Times carried a report on the slaying of 25,000 Jews in Latvia. That same day the New York Journal American reprinted a story from the London Evening Standard which reported that escapees arriving from Vilna had said that the toll of Jews slain there had reached 60,000. The New York Times also reported this news but in a way that contrasted sharply with the London Evening Standard’s report. According to the Standard, the source of the news was “a man who was in Vilna up to May 24 and himself saw much of the mass murder.” The New York Times described him as a man “who said he was in Vilna until May 24.” The New York Times then added the following paragraph. “The Polish refugee’s story of the Vilna massacre, of which he said he was an eyewitness, is impossible to confirm now.”8 Thus the New York Times established yet another barrier between itself and the news, shedding doubt on its authoritative nature. But this kind of treatment of the news was not unique to the New York Times, as would become abundantly clear during the next few months.

  Polish Confirmation and Press Reaction

  In June of 1942 the Polish authorities in London released a report they had received from Poland which confirmed that the Germans were murdering Jews throughout Poland. It described the “system” of killings which was “applied everywhere.” This information had been transmitted to London at the end of May by the Polish Jewish socialist organization, the Bund. The Bund report depicted how many of the massacres were conducted:

  Men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place—a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered or shot by machine guns or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, the sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed in the streets. In many towns the Jews were carried off to “an unknown destination” and killed in adjacent woods.

  According to the report the Jewish death toll in Poland had reached 700,000. The number of dead in Rovno was said to be 15,000, in Vilna 50,000 and in Slonim 9,000. Sealed railway cars with 25,000 people in them had left Lublin and virtually “disappeared without a trace.” But this report contained two other even more important and startling revelations. It told of death by gassings at Chelmno and estimated that on the “average” 1,000 people a day had been killed between November 1941 and March 1942 in gas chambers which could accommodate ninety people at a time. Of greatest significance was its revelation that these murders were part of a coordinated plan to murder the Jewish people. The opening line of the report stressed this point: “From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical annihilation of the Jewish population on Polish soil.” The report then laid out the grim but accurate description of what had happened. (Though the plan only mentioned 700,000 victims, by this time the toll was in the vicinity of 2 million.)9

  On June 2 the essence of the report was broadcast on the BBC. Toward the end of the month, after press conferences by members of the Polish government in exile’s National Council, it was picked up by the British press. On June 29 the World Jewish Congress sponsored a news conference at which Sidney S. Silverman, a member of the British Parliament, and Ignacy Schwarzbart, a member of the Polish National Council, told of the murder of Jews in Pinsk, Bialystok, Slonim, Rovno, Lvov, and dozens of other places. Schwarzbart spoke of the gassings at Chelmno and raised the estimated death toll to over 1 million.

  These revelations constituted a watershed in the dissemination of information regarding the Final Solution. Here were the first public reports of gassing and the first reference to a systematic continent-wide program of murder. Moreover, the news now had the official imprimatur of the London-based Polish government in exile and of British officials, members of Parliament, and the BBC. This was the first step in the transformation of the news from rumor to officially confirmed fact. It was becoming more difficult, though certainly not impossible, to dismiss this story as having no basis in truth. Details continued to make their way out of Europe in the months and years that followed. Yet while the secret of the war against the Jews had begun to seep through the Nazi fog, it was difficult for it to break through barriers in the Allied world. The American press did not ease its path. It did not highlight this news and often omitted from its reports key pieces of information or burdened them with various disclaimers.

  It is instructive to contrast the coverage of the American press with that of the British press. In Britain the story was treated in a direct and forceful style. The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post made the Bund report a main news item on the principal inside news page. The boldface headline read

  GERMANS MURDER 700,000

  JEWS IN POLAND

  TRAVELLING GAS CHAMBERS

  An even greater number of papers responded to the June 29 press conference. The London Times:

  MASSACRE OF JEWS—OVER 1,000,000 DEAD SINCE THE WAR BEGAN

  Daily Mail:

  GREATEST POGROM—ONE MILLION JEWS DIE

  Manchester Guardian:

  JEWISH WAR VICTIMS

  More than a Million Dead

  Daily Telegraph:

  MORE THAN 1,000,000 JEWS KILLED IN EUROPE

  Even some Canadian papers carried extensive accounts and explicit headlines. The Montreal Daily Star:

  “NAZI SLAUGHTERHOUSE”—GERMANS MASSACRE MILLION

  JEWS IN EXTERMINATION DRIVE

  Appalling Conditions Reported From

  Hitler-Dominated Countries10

 
The American reaction was far more muted. Behaving in a way that would become almost a hallmark of American press treatment of news of Nazi mass murders, papers placed the various stories on inner pages and allotted them but a few lines. Consequently, readers were left free to accept this news as valid or to dismiss it as unverified information in which the paper had little faith. The latter conclusion would have been easy to draw from the way the New York Times described the Polish escapee from Vilna, as mentioned above, or its decision to relegate the Polish government in exile’s June announcement to seventeen lines at the bottom of page 5. The easily missed article noted that 700,000 had been slain through a variety of methods, but completely ignored the revelation that this was part of a program of systematic slaughter. The news of the June 29 conference was placed in the lower half of page 7 and failed to mention that Silverman or Schwarzbart, both of whom were members of official governmental bodies—one British and one Polish—had been present at the conference. Instead the announcement of the death of 1 million was attributed to nameless “spokesmen for the World Jewish Congress.”11 The Los Angeles Times used an AP report that omitted most of the details and simply stated that the British Section of the World Jewish Congress estimated “that more than one million Jews have been killed or died as the result of ill treatment.” The two-paragraph, thirteen-line article, printed on page 3, carried the following headline: