Beyond Belief

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Over the course of July and August additional such stories appeared in the press. Most of the major American dailies handled them in a similar way, showing remarkable restraint, given the nature of the news. It was almost never on the front page. Commonly found on pages 3 through 10, often it was allotted a few lines, and rarely was it given a bold headline. On July 26, a month after the announcement by the Polish government in exile that “deportation” to the east meant death for Jews, the Chicago Tribune reported that the Nazis would shortly begin deporting all Dutch Jews between the ages of eighteen and forty. This story ran on page 9. In late July the Polish government in exile released details concerning the execution of 200,000 Jews and a quarter of a million Poles. The New York World Telegram story on the announcement omitted mention of Jews as victims and was placed on page 22 next to an article about a doctor who hypnotized himself into making a parachute jump. The two articles were accorded exactly the same amount of space.31

  Sometimes the press was so restrained that it simply ignored the Jews’ fate. A Los Angeles Times editorial in August discussed the condition of the civilian population in occupied countries. It cited UP estimates that the total number of civilian victims was 400,000 and the number of “hostages” in the millions. No mention was made of the Jews and what was happening to them. Even when it reported on the “Stop Hitler” rallies held in several United States cities during the summer, much of the press ignored the fact that they were, in the words of the organizers, a protest against the “extermination of Jews . . . . [by] forced labor, in concentration camps or as victims of experiment in poison gas factories.” Instead the rallies were described in nonspecific terms, e.g., as “rallies to protest against the barbaric treatment that is the lot of oppressed people in Nazi occupied countries.” Often no mention was made of Jews, gas chambers, or a program for mass murder. The New York Herald Tribune covered the New York rally in a way that almost totally obscured its objective. It virtually ignored that the rally had been called because of events in Europe. Both the headline and the article focused on the fact that Governor Lehman was “hissed” when he spoke out against a separate Jewish army.* CBS, NBC, and Mutual radio broadcasts failed to cover the gatherings.32

  Given the press ambivalence about the news, it is not surprising that there was little discussion of whether anything might be done to prevent further deaths. But during this particular period serious discussion of rescue had to face another obstacle as well. There was a common perception that the Allies were “not winning the war.” Editorials, news stories, and columns bemoaned the dire military situation. The Christian Science Monitor complained that it was so precarious that Allied officials were “withholding bad news.” Walter Lippmann decried the “cult of incompetence” that characterized Allied war efforts. The gravity of the situation was reinforced by setbacks in Russia, North Africa, and the Pacific. News of deportations from France and massacres and the death of multitudes in Eastern Europe had to compete with headlines proclaiming

  NAZIS SMASH AT MOSCOW

  Russ Retreat All Along Line

  The Germans were pushing toward the Caucusus; Stalingrad was on the verge of collapse. The German advance into Russia seemed unstoppable. Western Europe was firmly in Nazi control. The North African coast was in German hands. The Japanese were winning key Pacific battles. American military installations at Guadalcanal were under heavy bombardment. In late September a Los Angeles Times front-page headline proclaimed

  WAR DECLARED BEING LOST33

  Even those optimists who believed victory would come eventually had to acknowledge that a long pitched battle lay ahead.34Anyone who might have argued for rescue of Jews found the moral imperative of the argument significantly vitiated by the military situation. Thus those who could not or did not want to believe discounted the news as implausible, while those who believed and wanted concerted rescue efforts could not demand them when the military prognosis seemed so bleak.

  Rationalizing the Deportations

  As we have seen, ever since the Nazis had begun to persecute Jews, the American press had felt compelled to offer rational explanations of the events to its readers. It continued to do so even as the news of massacres and deportations reached the west. This inclination to find a rational explanation was so compelling that at times the press accepted information released by the Nazis—designed to camouflage the Final Solution—at face value. Deportations, the Nazis announced and the press reported, were necessary in order to provide homes for “bombed out Aryans.” The denial of the right of Jews to emigrate was explained by Nazis and the press as due to the Reich’s labor shortage.35 On certain occasions when the Nazis made their intentions clear, the press refused to accept the implications of what was being said because it seemed too fantastic to believe. When Goebbels announced that the “Jews had started the war” and would “pay for every dead soldier,” the Chicago Tribune responded by explaining that the deportations and persecution were “nothing but” a means of giving Germans who had lost fathers and sons in Russia and were “facing the privations of another war winter the spectacle of a few unfortunate people whose sufferings make their own seem bearable by comparison.”36 The Springfield (Ohio) News Sun also believed that the persecution of the Jews was a diversion aimed at keeping

  the German people from overmuch brooding on the hardships imposed by an order holding guns preferable to butter. Except some scapegoat were offered they might have put the blame for low living standards where it belonged. Nazi propagandists nominated the Jew.

  Because the blitzkrieg had bogged down as the German assault on Russia was stalled, the Nazis intensified the drive against their “helpless old scapegoat, the Jews.”37

  American newspaper readers were told that Jews were being deported to the Ukraine to serve in work battalions and help with the harvesting of crops, that Jews in France, Belgium, and Holland were being deported because they had been “conscripted for work in Germany,” and that the deportations were taking place because “some Jews tried to escape into neighboring countries.” When 27,000 Jews in France were “rounded up” and sent to concentration camps at the end of July 1942, AP interpreted the move as a measure to increase “pressure on the French to supply the Nazi war industry with more skilled workers.”38 Even the Manchester Guardian, which had resolutely publicized the fate of European Jewry since the Nazi rise to power, fell prey to rationalizing. In late August 1942, two months after the release of the Polish government in exile report, the paper observed in an editorial that “the deportation of Jews to Poland means that Jews’ muscles are needed for the German war effort.”39

  That there was a tendency during the initial years of the war to explain the deportations in this fashion is understandable; it was logical to do so. As has been pointed out, it was difficult to comprehend that antisemitism was not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is harder to condone the continuation of this tendency to rationalize once word of the Final Solution was released. In August 1942 an article in the Christian Science Monitor on the deportations of Jews from France, Berlin, Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia acknowledged that Jews were being killed. In fact it considered it impossible to “escape the conviction that the Nazis are endeavoring to exterminate the Jews of Europe in the shortest possible time.” The situation was more “desperate now than it had ever been.” But then the paper went on to explain why this was happening. Not only did the Germans need a “scapegoat to justify the increased demands that are being made on the German people,” but they wanted to isolate Jews from the invading Allied armies. The Germans feared that the Jews would be “a dangerous partisan threat” when the time came for the Allied attack and would rush to the Allies’ aid.40 Similarly, the London-based Economist hypothesized that Himmler may have feared the “enormous influence which the ghettoes could exercise upon the whole Polish underground movement at a moment critical for the Germans,” and therefore decided to “apply more drastic measures. . . . [in the form of] the mass murder of ten
s of thousands.”41 UP explained that the Germans had deported millions of Jews and others in order to rid “potentially troublesome areas [of] . . . potential leaders and paralyze further resistance,” to “weaken the help available to an Allied second front army,” and to “provide slave labor for Nazi war factories and for construction gangs on fortifications.”42 This kind of explanation turned the murdering of Jews into a tactical imperative.

  Of course the press was not alone in its failure to accept what was truly underway. Government officials and a great portion of the American public shared its doubts. When reports of a plan to massacre Jews reached Allied hands, some British officials dismissed them as “sob stuff.” They argued that the reports of mass murder were exaggerated by Jews “who have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years.”43

  As the months passed and the deportations continued, press reports did not question the fact that to be a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe was to live under the shadow of death. Typically, Paul Ghali, writing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, described the conflict raging in Switzerland over the policy of expelling Jewish refugees who had crossed the border illegally. To Ghali, as well as the other reporters stationed in neutral countries in Europe, it was obvious that “turning back these refugees . . . will probably mean their death” because of the conditions they would face. Similarly, in an editorial on August 29, the New York Times condemned the deportation of 25,000 Jews from France. The paper described them as “serfs, destined to hard labor and the scantiest food and shelter after they have been deported to eastern Europe,” but the editorial made no mention of another fate they were destined to face: murder.44 There was no doubt that being a Jew meant living in conditions of disease, starvation, hard labor, all of which resulted in premature death. But what the press could not see or acknowledge was that Jews were now dying by the hundreds of thousands as the result of a policy more calculated and terrible in breadth and precision. And long after the Final Solution had been repeatedly confirmed and verified, explanations—sometimes of the most macabre sort—were being offered. Some of these explanations came from German sources, others from the Allies themselves. In February 1944 a number of papers reported the Dutch government’s claim that Dutch Jews had been killed “so that more food will be available for Germans.” In July of that year the New York Times related suspicions among the Allies “that the wholesale killing of Jews is just another Nazi method of opening peace negotiations.”45

  There were, of course, papers which understood the Nazis’ motivations and were able to make the leap of imagination necessary in order to understand what was happening. In August 1942, when both the Christian Science Monitor and the Economist were offering tactical reasons to explain why the Nazis were killing Jews, a London Times editorial noted that while much of the uprooting of populations could be explained as German desire to denude “troublesome areas of most of their menfolk [and] . . . potential leaders” in order to “paralyze resistance,” this was not what was happening to the Jews. When 20,000 Jews were deported from France, “strategic considerations [could] scarcely be involved.” Those transfers had no military rationale but were proof of the “Nazi determination to purge western Europe of all its Jews.” Most important, the paper recognized something which much of the American press would never really grasp:

  Hitler had always treated the complete segregation, if not extermination, of the Jews as the foundation of the “new order.”46

  The treatment in the American press of the news of dire conditions facing European Jewry—the fact that the press did not ignore the reports of deportations and even death but devoted little prominent space to them and often added disclaimers and qualifiers—reflected the chasm that existed between information and knowledge. It was a chasm that many editors and journalists would not be able to bridge until well after the Final Solution had reached its end.47

  Allied Confirmation

  Two weeks before the end of 1942 the Allied governments themselves confirmed the existence of a program for the annihilation of European Jewry. Nonetheless, press treatment of it did not substantially change. There was a momentary flurry of interest which rapidly faded. Allied confirmation was preceded, in late November and December of 1942, by important revelations that, as usual, were often greeted guardedly by editors and generally confined to the inner recesses of most papers.

  Late in November 1942 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, in his capacity as chairman of the World Jewish Congress, announced that 2 million Jews in occupied Europe had been slain in an “extermination campaign.” According to Wise, Hitler had ordered the murder of all Jews in Nazi-ruled Europe; the Jewish population of Warsaw had been reduced from a half million to 100,000; 80 percent of the Jews in Europe had been transferred to Poland, where they were destined for death, and the Nazis were using their corpses for “war vital commodities as soap fats and fertilizers.” Wise, anxious to allay any doubts about the reliability of his announcements, stressed that his sources had been “confirmed by the State Department.” In addition to State Department confirmation, Wise said that a representative of the President had returned from Europe to tell Wise that the “worst you have thought is true.”*

  The press’s handling of Wise’s announcement provides some important insights into its treatment of the news of the Final Solution. Some of the major dailies—including the Dallas News, Denver Post, Miami Herald, New York Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Examiner, and St. Louis Post Dispatch—ran news of Wise’s announcement on their front pages. Most, however, placed it on their inside pages. The Los Angeles Times carried it on page 2, the San Francisco Examiner on page 5, the New York Journal American, New York World Telegram, and Baltimore Sun on page 3, the Chicago Tribune on page 4, the Washington Post on page 6, the Christian Science Monitor on page 7, and the New York Times on page 10. The Atlanta Constitution put it on page 20 with the want ads and the train schedules, while the Kansas City Star and the New Orleans Times Picayune did not carry it at all. CBS, NBC, and Mutual radio broadcasts also ignored Wise’s announcement.49

  Despite Wise’s contention that the State Department and the White House had authenticated his information, most major papers treated this as a story released by a Jewish source and an interested party. It was the “outcry of the victims themselves,” an ex parte statement and consequently less trustworthy than those that came from disinterested parties.50 Even the Jewish Agency, the official representative of the Palestinian Jewish community, considered non-Jewish eyewitnesses more credible than Jewish ones. In 1943 the Jewish Agency’s Geneva office relayed to the State Department information it had received concerning the deportation and murder of the Jews from two people whom it pointedly described as “reliable eye-witnesses (Aryans).”51

  The AP wire service report on Wise’s announcement, which was used by most of the dailies, was skeptical about Wise’s claims to have State Department confirmation. Wise was described as “asserting that he was authorized to disclose details by the State Department,” recounting “atrocities which he claimed had been confirmed,” and telling a story which was “reportedly confirmed” by the State Department. The headlines accompanying the article in most major dailies naturally adopted a similar approach. Wise was identified as the source, and the State Department’s role was virtually ignored. The Chicago Tribune:

  2 Million Jews Slain by Nazis, Dr. Wise Avers

  Washington Post:

  2 Million Jews Slain, Rabbi Wise Asserts

  New York Herald Tribune:

  Wise Says Hitler Has Ordered 4,000,000 Jews Slain in 1942

  Baltimore Sun:

  Jewish Extermination Drive Laid to Hitler by Dr. Wise

  New York Journal American:

  Wise to Reveal Nazis’ Program to Kill Jews

  Los Angeles Examiner:

  Two Million Jews Slain, Wise Says52

  The New York Times was one of the few major papers whose headline not only referred to the State Department but treated Wise’s assertions with a degree
of certitude:

  Wise Gets Confirmations

  Checks with State Department On Nazis’ “Extermination Campaign”

  Though the Times headline mentioned the State Department, the story was run on page 10 as an addendum to an article on the murder of 250,000 Polish Jews—an article based on information released by the Polish government in exile in London. The New York daily PM, which had a distinctively liberal editorial policy and was in the forefront of the few papers and journals calling for an activist rescue policy, ran a headline and a series of stories which contrasted sharply with those of other papers. The cover of the paper, which related what news was to be found on the inner pages, carried the following headline in boldface print:

  HITLER SPEEDS UP MURDER OF JEWS

  Inside the headline read

  HITLER ORDERS MURDER OF ALL EUROPE’S JEWS

  On the following day PM carried stories based on State Department documents which Wise released to the press:

  This is Fascism: How Nazis

  Slaughtered 24,000 Jews in Latvia53

  Throughout this period PM publicized this news directly and forcefully. Its handling of these reports contrasted markedly with that of most other dailies.

  The State Department, in a series of off-the-record conversations with press representatives, had distanced itself from Wise. In response to queries as to whether it had confirmed the information, all that J. McDermot, chief of the State Department’s Division of Current Information, would say was that Rabbi Wise had visited the Department “in connection with certain material in which he was interested” and he was given this material. Even this was told to the press “in confidence and not for publication.” According to McDermot, the only thing the Department had done was “facilitate the efforts of [Wise’s] Committee in getting at the truth.” He would neither confirm information nor answer any questions on the matter. Instead correspondents were directed to pose “all questions concerning this material to Rabbi Wise.”54R. Borden Reams, who was in charge of Jewish affairs for the European Division of the State Department, pressured Wise, though unsuccessfully, to “avoid any implications” that the State Department was the source of “documentary proof of these stories.”55 It is not surprising, therefore, that the AP dispatch and the various headlines reflected some ambiguity.