Beyond Belief
Page 20
NAZIS KILL MILLION
JEWS, SAYS SURVEY
The Atlanta Constitution ran the same two-paragraph AP report under a headline indicating a little more faith in the story than the Los Angeles Times:
1,000,000 JEWS KILLED
BY NAZI TREATMENT
The Miami Herald placed the story on page 2 but allotted it only twelve lines. The New York World Telegram ran a twenty-three-line story on page 4 which mentioned neither Schwarzbart’s nor Silverman’s participation in the news conference. But it did note that the death toll resulted from the Nazis’ long-standing pronouncement that “physical extermination of the Jew must from now on be the aim of Germany and her allies.” According to this article the Poles had said that probably 700,000 Jews had been killed in Poland and Lithuania, 125,000 in Rumania, 200,000 in Russia and 100,000 in the rest of Europe.12 A similarly ambivalent attitude was demonstrated by the Chicago Tribune, which placed the story on page 6 and allocated a total of eleven lines to it. No mention was made of Silverman, and the deaths were attributed to “ill treatment.”13
We might ask—and perhaps readers at the time wondered too—why the editors placed news of this magnitude on the inner pages and accorded it so little space. If they believed the news, then it should have been given more attention, and if they did not believe, then why were the stories printed at all? Part of the explanation may be found in the headline which the New York Journal American placed over its page 1 eight-line article which neither mentioned an extermination “policy” nor provided any death tolls for the various countries involved:
JEWS LIST THEIR DEAD AT MILLION14
This was a Jewish story, worthy of reporting, but not worthy of complete trust because Jews were “interested parties.”*
CBS radio, which had provided sparse coverage of the persecution of the Jews, included news of the press conference in its June 29 New York news broadcast. It was the first discussion of the Jews’ situation on CBS radio since May 23, when John Daly reported on fear of forest fires in Norway, conscription of Poles by the Germans, Germany’s conquest of Sweden, and then added that “the Nazi oppression has even been extended to Jews in Holland. And the Jews have been ordered to display the star of David on their clothing. And that’s the world today.” On the 29th of June, Quincy Howe informed CBS listeners that
A horrifying reminder of what this war means to certain noncombatants comes from the World Jewish Congress in London today. It is now estimated that the Germans have massacred more than one million Jews in Europe since the war began. That’s about one sixth of the Jewish population in the Old World. Moreover, those Jews who survive lead a subhuman existence on a fraction of the already short rations to which the rest of the population of Europe is reduced. The Jewish population of Germany has declined from 600,000 to 100,000 since Hitler took power. Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal are the only countries in continental Europe where Jews still possess human rights. In the Pacific war zones the Japanese suffered another defeat at American hands . . . .
Though this broadcast offered more information than most other reports, there was still no mention of a systematic extermination program.16
There were some exceptions to this general pattern. The New York Herald Tribune devoted significant attention to this story, placing an eighty-two-line article on page 1 and running a headline which both accurately reflected the contents of the article and made it clear that things could still get worse:
NAZI SLAUGHTER OF MILLION JEWS SO FAR CHARGED;
World Congress Leaders Tell London of Systematic
Massacre over Europe17
Though the story acknowledged that what was taking place was part of a systematic program, it failed to mention the gas chambers at Chelmno and reports of poisonous gas in use in other parts of Poland. These facts may still have been too fantastic for the editors to accept.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch placed the story of the Polish government in exile’s June 26 announcement on the front page of its news section in the far-right column. This article, one of the more detailed to appear on the topic, was written by David M. Nichol, a reporter in London. He said estimates were that 700,000 Jews had already died: “disease and starvation are allowed to operate to the fullest extent. Where these methods are considered insufficient or slow, massacre tactics often are substituted, . . . sources say.” Both the headline and the story itself stressed something that many other papers simply ignored: poison gas was being used to kill Jews. Though the article spoke of ninety being killed “at a time,” the headline made it sound as if only ninety had been killed. Neither the article nor the headline mentioned that the report estimated that 1,000 people a day were dying in this fashion.
NAZIS REPORTED
KILLING POLISH
JEWS WITH GAS
90 Said to Have
Been Herded Into
Chamber for Mass
Execution.
Despite this lacuna the article treated the news in far greater detail than did most of the other major dailies. Nichol was unable to believe that this killing did not have some ulterior purpose, and he surmised that these gas chambers were being used “perhaps [for] testing lethal weapons which may sometime find more general use.” It is significant that Nichol noted that the charges of killing with gas “find grim confirmation” in the reports which had emerged from the Reich regarding the euthanasia program for people “incurably ill or mentally defective.”18 By citing this precedent for murder by gas, the article may well have pierced readers’ fog of disbelief and made the news more credible. At least it offered a historical precedent to those willing to accept it.
Over the next few days various stories appeared concerning the massacres. On July 2 a one-column article on page 6 of the New York Times discussed the Bund report’s revelation that gas chambers were being used and that massacres were frequent. In addition to noting that 25,000 had been taken from Lublin and that “nothing has been heard of them since,” it listed other slaughter sites:
At Lwow 35,000 were slain, at Stanislawow, 15,000; at Tarnopol 5,000; at Zioctrow 2,000; at Brezanzany only 1,700 were left of 18,000. The massacre still continues in Lwow.
The article concluded by quoting what was probably the most ominous sentence in the report, “Whoever wins, all Jews will be murdered.” Even though the paper strengthened the credibility of the report by observing that the information in it was “supported by information received by other Jewish circles here and also by the Polish Government,” the New York Times felt obliged to include a disclaimer. Apparently not believing that 700,000 people could be massacred, it informed readers that this figure “probably includes many who died of maltreatment in concentration camps, of starvation in ghettos or of unbearable conditions of forced labor.” The value the Times placed on this news was also evident in its decision to run the story of Governor Lehman’s donation of his tennis shoes to the scrap rubber drive on the top of page 1 and the Bund report on page 6. Furthermore, the headline highlighted a relatively minor aspect of the story, namely that the Polish underground had called for retribution, and made it appear that this was the main thrust of the article.
ALLIES ARE URGED TO EXECUTE NAZIS
Report On Slaughter Of Jews In Poland
Asks Like Treatment for Germans
Curb on Reich Sought
‘Only Way To Save Millions From Certain Destruction,’
Says the Appeal19
One week later, on July 9, the paper reported that according to the Polish underground 3 million Poles and Jews had become victims of the Nazis. Over 500,000 had been sent to Germany as forced labor, while 200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews were “murdered outright” by the Nazis. This excluded those who died of “starvation and disease.” The Vice Premier of the Polish government in exile “fully corroborated the information.” Approximately three-quarters of the way down the 125-line article, brief mention was made of the fact that Poles had refused to accept certain governmental and administrative posts
offered them by the Germans. Though this was a relatively minor aspect of the story, it was the point the New York Times featured in the headline:
POLES SPURN POSTS UNDER NAZI REGIME
Cooperation Bid Falls Upon Deaf Ears,
Document from Underground Leaders Says
ARDENT PLEA TO ALLIES
Report Read in London Puts Germany’s Toll of Victims at
3,000,000 Mark
On July 23 the New York Times printed a small story regarding 120,000 Jews who had been sent to Poland, where 53,000 had been killed. Reference was also made to 17,000 Austrians who had been murdered since the war began. The headline ignored the 53,000.
Says Nazis Slew 17,000
Austrian-American League, Inc., Reports Toll Since Invasion
The New York Times may have placed the smaller more plausible number in the headline because it came from a non-Jewish source, while the 53,000 came from a Jewish source.20 This was not the only time the paper behaved in this fashion. Many times during this period, whenever the New York Times reported the deaths of non-Jewish civilians, it paid them more attention than it did the deaths of Jews, even though the number of non-Jewish victims was far smaller. On May 5 a page 1 story reported on the shooting of seventy-two Dutch anti-Nazis. In an editorial the paper strongly decried their deaths along with those of fifty-five at Lille, France, and eighteen in Oslo. Two days later a page 7 story told of forty killed in France in retaliation for the derailment of a German train. On May 24 a page 5 headline proclaimed
NAZIS’ EXECUTIONS PUT AT 97 IN WEEK
Eight days later the following headline appeared on page 4:
18 MORE CZECHS EXECUTED BY NAZIS
Charged with Link to Attack on Heydrich,
Who Is Said to Approach Crisis
Total Slain is Now 81
Two Families at Bruenn Are Reported Among the
44 Persons Killed Saturday21
When the paper printed the story on the BBC broadcast concerning the death of 700,000 Jews, it ran it at the end of a series of other short stories concerning Nazi atrocities. Among the stories which preceded the BBC report was the news of the shooting of five Poles for striking Germans and the slaying of 800 Czechs in punishment for the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich’s murder. The figure of 800 is exceptional: rarely did these stories deal with more than a hundred deaths; often the toll was far less. Nonetheless they were accorded more space and prominence than much larger death tolls. It is possible that the New York Times believed the death of non-Jewish civilians, particularly in reprisal for “anti-Nazi” behavior, to be something new and different and therefore especially worthy of readers’ attention, whereas the death of Jews was no longer a novel event.
There is yet another explanation which must be considered in the case of the New York Times. The paper, particularly during the period of the 1930s and 1940s, was anxious not to appear “too Jewish.” As Gay Talese, who once worked for the paper, observed, “the New York Times does not wish to be thought of as a Jewish newspaper’ . . . and [therefore] it will bend over backwards to prove this . . . forcing itself at times into unnatural positions, contorted by compromise.” David Halberstam, in The Powers That Be, offers a similar analysis of the paper’s behavior regarding Jews.*
The New York Times was—and in many quarters still is—considered America’s “newspaper of record,” and in a poll taken during the period, accredited Washington correspondents by a vote of more than five to one judged it to be the nation’s most reliable, comprehensive, and fair paper. Had the Times reacted with less equanimity, it is possible that other American papers would have followed suit.23
There is also another explanation for the attention the New York Times, as well as some other papers, paid to the reports of the reprisal killing of non-Jews: source credibility in editors’ eyes. The information regarding such killings generally came from official German sources. In mid-June 1942 the Germans announced that they had killed 480 civilians in Lidice, in reprisal for the murder of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. In a front-page story the New York Times described the Germans as having “blot[ted] out” the Bohemian village. This, the New York Herald Tribune observed, was not the product of the
terrified imagination of a refugee or [the] invention of an angry propagandist. It is the official announcement of the Nazi radio. A foolish German emperor, in an oratorical indiscretion, once told his soldiers to act like Huns. This is the formal statement of a government that it has actually done so.24
A similar judgment about source credibility may have been what led the Chicago Tribune to allot a front-page banner headline to the murder of 258 Jews by the SS but to relegate the news of the death of 1 million to eleven lines in the bottom half of page 6. The front-page headline, which stretched across most of the upper half of the page, read:
HITLER GUARDS STAGE NEW POGROM; KILL 258;
MASSACRED BY BERLIN GESTAPO IN ‘BOMB PLOT’;
Families Herded for Deportation.
Although the story was not the formal statement of a government, it came from “various trustworthy sources” in Berlin who had access to officials in the SS and the Propaganda Ministry. Two days later the Chicago Daily Tribune devoted nine lines on the lower half of page 6 to the report by the Federation of Jewish Relief Organizations that 25,000 Latvian Jews had been slain during the German invasion the previous summer. This news came not from the perpetrators or other “trustworthy” sources, but from the victims. Consequently it was less credible. The New York Times also ran the story of the execution of the 258 on page 1. Two days later it placed the report of the massacre of thousands in Vilna on page 6. It put the story of the BBC report on the death of 700,000 Jews on page 5 at the end of a string of other short articles concerning a variety of war matters.25
In addition to its being the word of the perpetrators, there is yet another explanation for why news released by the Germans was treated as more credible than news released by the Jews or by the Polish government in exile. The number of victims, while not small, was entirely within the realm of “reason.” In contrast, the tolls given by Polish and Jewish organizations could be dismissed as too immense to be plausible. A million was a hard number to fathom, particularly a million victims not killed in the line of duty, but slaughtered in cold blood. A toll of 258 or even 800, while certainly tragic, was within most people’s grasp. These were numbers with which they were conversant. Ironically, the larger the proportions of the tragedy, the less believable the story became.
Incidentally, in the case of the story of the 258, the accusations of the perpetrators were greeted with skepticism. New York Times reporter George Axelson, who cabled this story from Stockholm, did not doubt that 258 Jews “were put to death by the S.S.” However, he questioned the Nazi claim that the victims had planted bombs on the premises of an anti-Bolshevist exhibit because it seemed impossible that Jews who had to wear “the conspicuous Star of David on their clothing and are ruled off Unter den Linden and streets of central Berlin generally” could have obtained the bombs and then successfully placed them in the exhibit. Despite the Gestapo’s claims to have “unquestionable proof,” Axelson was skeptical, particularly because the five bombs were discovered prior to being detonated.26
The pattern of subdued, almost repressed treatment of much of the news of the Final Solution continued even as the pace and scope of the news increased. At the end of July, news of the plans to wipe out the Warsaw ghetto reached the west. In light of the previous reports of mass murder there was good reason to believe that the 600,000 Jews in Warsaw were about to face a fate similar to what had befallen the Jews of Vilna, Lvov, Latvia, eastern Galicia, and other parts of Poland and Russia. In the New York Times a UP release carried the following headline:
YUGOSLAVS DRIVING
AXIS FROM BOSNIA
Guerrillas Rout Italians and
Cause State of Siege in
Zagreb, London Hears
New Warsaw Curbs Due
Nazis Said to Plan Wiping Out
of 600,000 in Ghetto—17
Condemned in Bulgaria
Not only did readers have to reach the final section of this rather lengthy headline to find reference to the news of the fate which awaited the inhabitants of the ghetto, but they had to read through to the 79th line of a 121-line story to learn that the “Nazi authorities in Poland are planning to ‘exterminate’ the entire Warsaw ghetto whose population is estimated at 600,000 Jews.” Although the report of the “despair and suicides [which] had swept the Warsaw ghetto” when the new deportations from the ghetto began was attributed to “reliable reports from the Continent,” it was placed on page 7 as part of an array of other stories regarding the war. The page placement and the juxtaposition of the threat to 600,000 with the condemnation of 17 seemed to reflect this continued ambivalence about both the importance and the reliability of the news.27
The Toronto Globe adopted a markedly different approach. It ran the story on the Warsaw ghetto as a separate news story with the following headline:
GESTAPO PLANS TO EXTERMINATE ALL JEWS IN WARSAW GHETTO
According to Polish spokesmen quoted in the article, “two train loads of Jews have departed toward their doom without anything further being heard from them.”28 Newsweek, which ignored the Polish government in exile announcement but ran the story on the deportations from the ghetto, followed suit. According to the magazine Jews were now being taken from the Warsaw ghetto and relocated “600 miles farther east.” Instead of speculating about what “relocation” might really mean, it simply noted that “two trainloads of Jews had already vanished into black Limbo.”29The British-based news agency Reuters was far more explicit regarding the “passengers” destination. “Two trainloads have left. It is feared that when they arrive they will be murdered.” Then, as if to further validate these fears, the Reuters dispatch went on to state that “near Lodzimieres in Eastern Poland there is a common grave, a mile long, of thousands of massacred Jews.”30