Beyond Belief

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  The terrible futility which characterized Bermuda was graphically illustrated by two headlines that appeared next to each other in the April 20 issue of the New York Journal American:

  Rescue Far Off For Axis

  2 Million Jews Slain

  Victims, Parley Fears

  By Nazis

  A similar juxtaposition was to be found on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune:

  Victory Called Vital to

  Report Tells of Nazi

  Solving Refugee Relief

  Annihilation of 2,000,000 Jews in Europe62

  The annihilation was proceeding with unbridled ferocity; the details were emerging. But rescue was “far off.”

  On April 22 a small article appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Though there was little this conference could have done to aid the particular group of Jews involved, their plight was a consequence of the kind of futility which was at the heart of Bermuda:

  SECRET POLISH RADIO ASKS AID, CUT OFF

  Stockholm, Sweden, April 21—The secret Polish radio appealed for help tonight in a broadcast from Poland and then suddenly the station went dead. The broadcast, as heard here, said: “The last 35,000 Jews in the ghetto at Warsaw have been condemned to execution. Warsaw again is echoing to musketry volleys.

  “The people are murdered. Women and children defend themselves with their naked arms.

  “Save us . . .”63

  This sudden front-page attention quickly faded, and the next day the story of the battle in the ghetto was on page 9, despite the fact that it described how the Nazis were forced to use tanks against the ghetto fighters and noted that the battle was reported to be costing many German lives. Two weeks later a report that the battle had been going on for seventeen days as Jews “fighting against annihilation” had “converted their homes into forts” was contained in 29 lines on page 7. Even the reported toll of 60 Nazis killed during the uprising was on page 6. Whereas other reports of resistance usually generated excitement and attention, this story did not.64

  A year later on the anniversary of the uprising the New York Times devoted an editorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In it it spoke of the “profound respect” due the ghetto fighters, who “set for the rest of us an example of courage that history can scarcely match.” It seems strange that the paper, which now found them such an “inspiration,” did not pay too much attention while the battle was underway.65

  10

  Witness to the Persecution

  As 1943 drew to a close and 1944 began, an Allied victory grew increasingly certain. At the same time that the Nazi assault on Europe was losing momentum, the campaign against the Jews proceeded with even greater ferocity. Leland Harrison, the American Consul in Bern, Switzerland, wrote to the State Department that the German commitment to “total warfare has not pushed doctrine [of antisemitism] aside,” but instead “renewed emphasis [is] placed” on it.1

  Articles in the American press firmly indicated that the pace of the Final Solution had not abated.2 Jewish communities that had previously seemed fairly secure were now reported to be in great danger. The reports of ghettoization and deportations were accompanied by stories of Jewish communities which had disappeared in their entirety. Some communities—Danish Jewry, most notably—were miraculously rescued, but generally communities were reported by the press to be either “virtually wiped out,” as in Greece, or on the verge of destruction. The Jewish community of Rome, which had survived for so long despite the fact that Italy was Germany’s chief ally, now faced deportation. Norway’s Jews were reported to have been rounded up and sent to Germany.3 Jewish and non-Jewish sources spoke of a death toll even higher than had been previously imagined. Repatriated Americans who had been held in German prison camps returned in March 1944 with “harrowing stories” about the “systematic elimination of Jews in Prague and the use of Czech Jews as guinea pigs to test the strength of Skoda’s poison gas.”4 As the Russians began to regain territory occupied by the Germans, eyewitnesses provided additional reports on massacres, such as those in Kiev.

  Though the news of the Final Solution was more devastating and more certain than ever before, the major dailies—including the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York World Telegram, New York Journal American, Atlanta Constitution, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Examiner, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Washington Post, and Washington Star among many others—continued to ignore the news or give it cursory coverage at best. Though the New York Times provided more coverage than most papers, it too was quite sparing in the space and attention it allotted to this news. On February 11, 1944, the final two paragraphs of a page 5 New York Times article on Greece’s civil war mentioned that “according to reliable information” all Salonika’s Jews had been “wiped out.” On February 12 a twenty-nine-line article at the very bottom of page 6 reported that a Jewish fugitive from a Nazi camp had described an “execution mill” in Poland and told how he had witnessed trains packed with Jews leave the camp for eastern Poland and the site of the crematorium in the morning and return in the evening empty.5 Five days later an article on page 9 relayed the Polish government in exile’s charges that the Nazis were carrying out the “complete extermination of all Jewish children in Poland.”6 On February 18 the Times devoted thirty-two lines on page 7 to a UP report that Holland’s 180,000 Jews had been “completely wiped out.” This article ran beneath a long somewhat humorous story about how a sleeping American sergeant had been awakened by the King and Queen of England.7

  In early March the Jewish National Committee in Poland estimated that within a few weeks no more than 50,000 Jews would remain in Poland. “In our last moment before death, the remnants of Polish Jewry appeal for help to the whole world.” The New York Times devoted sixteen lines to their appeal and attached it to a page 4 story on the budget granted to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. That same day a lengthy story on page 1 was devoted to gangster Louis Lepke’s attempts to delay his execution.8 On March 14 the Polish Telegraph Agency reported on the “wholesale killings in Lwow” and described how a “continual stream of Poles and Jews [were delivered] to the execution grounds.” This thirty-five-line article appeared on page 14.9 Even when the news came from the paper’s own reporters, its policy was not perceptibly different. On March 5 a New York Times reporter with the Russian forces in the Ukraine provided a description of the application of German antisemitic policy with “horrifying precision” throughout the Ukraine. The article appeared on page 6 of the paper, while page 1 carried a report on how even Monte Carlo was beginning to feel the pinch of wartime austerity. Its “war boom spree” was over, and now British whisky, Havana cigars, American cigarettes, and whipped cream would all be harder to obtain.10

  There was a real contradiction between the New York Times policy of page placement and its declared editorial policy. At the same time that the paper was carrying the story of the Final Solution in small articles on inner pages, on its editorial page it proclaimed the “need to keep reminding ourselves” that “the cold-blooded extermination” of the Jews was taking place.11 Obviously, for the Times a few short lines on pages 4, 6, and 14 were reminders enough. A careful reader of the paper might well have seen many of these articles, but many probably did not. But the way the New York Times treated a particular story did not just determine the number of Times readers who saw it. The New York Times is considered “the gatekeeper of the American press.” Many American papers take their cues from it; i.e., when it stresses a story, other papers are likely to do likewise. Conversely, if the Times ignores something, this too sends a message to other papers. In addition various dailies subscribe to the New York Times foreign wire service and reprint important stories from the paper. Only rarely were stories concerning the Jews treated in a way that would have prompted other papers to think them significant or worthy of reprinting. Whe
n the New York Times’s record is compared with that of other dailies, many of which almost totally ignored the story, it can be said to be relatively good. If, however, one compares the New York Times coverage with its editorial declaration of the need to continuously “remind” Americans of what was taking place or its claim to be the “newspaper of record,” then it was a failure.*

  Hungary: A “Living Hell”

  In March 1944 the situation of approximately 1 million Hungarian Jews suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse. The Nazis installed a puppet government in Budapest, and it was clear that one of its first activities would be to clamp down on the Jews. Even before the occupation of Hungary was completed, columnist Paul Winkler, writing in the Washington Post, predicted that Hungarian Jews could anticipate the imposition of the “same ruthless treatment meted out to their co-religionists in other countries.” The Christian Science Monitor matter-of-factly noted that once the Germans assumed control of civil rule, the Jews in Hungary “may expect to suffer.”13

  The news of these developments in Hungary was particularly disturbing because it was especially difficult to deny. It came after “reliably” confirmed reports of a similar nature had come from many other parts of Europe; the story of the Final Solution was now more than two years old and hard to dismiss as a fabrication. Second, information also came from neutral diplomats stationed in Hungary who were known to be quite sympathetic to the Hungarian government. Their confirmation in the spring of 1944 of the Hungarian government’s plans to murder this community of over 1 million was, therefore, authoritative. In contrast to Jewish groups, who would later be described as “having an ax to grind,” or even refugee agencies or governments in exile, which were also considered interested parties, these diplomats could not be accused of telling lies in order to incite hostility against the Hungarians. Third, it was clear that the Axis would soon be defeated. With the end of the conflagration in sight, it was particularly hard to fathom—especially for those in the ranks of the press who did not grasp the idea of a war against the Jews as separate and apart from the conventional war—why the Germans were destroying this community. Even as portions of Europe were on the verge of being liberated, the Jews of Hungary were on the verge of destruction. Finally, Hungary had been one of the few European countries in which Jews had been relatively secure until March 19, the date on which the Nazis established the puppet government in Budapest. But despite all these factors the press continued to treat this news as, at best, a “war sidelight.”14

  By early spring of 1944 the situation in Hungary was rapidly deteriorating. In mid-April Winkler noted that the speed with which the Germans were imposing restrictions on the Jews indicated that should they be faced with defeat, they “intended to leave no Jews alive behind them.” For Hungarian Jews the “sentence of death has been passed.” Even the euphemism long used by the Nazis to obscure what they were doing no longer served its purpose. When the Hungarian government announced its intention to build “special baths,” New York Times reporter Joseph Levy told his readers that these “baths are in reality huge gas chambers arranged for mass murder, like those inaugurated in Poland.”15 (Actually the Hungarian government never built the “special baths,” but deported the Jews to Poland, where they were murdered.)

  Now little was left open to speculation. One of the most striking aspects of this terrible saga is that at each stage in the process of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, the news of what had happened and of what would next occur was available to the press, but many papers chose not to make it available to their readers. Once again, with the exception of the liberal PM, the New York Times can be said to have had the best record. But as I have noted, “best” is a relative term. On May 4 a page 11 article reported that Hungary had liquidated over half the remaining Jewish businesses. On May 10 an article on page 5 described how Jews in Hungary were “living in fear of imminent annihilation, from which there seems to be no escape.”16 On May 18, Levy reported that the initial steps in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry had been completed. “The first act in the program of mass extermination of Jews in Hungary is over, and 80,000 Jews of the Carpathian provinces have already disappeared. They have been sent to murder camps in Poland.” Levy, whose dispatches on this topic were among the most detailed and frightening to appear in the press, offered those who read page 5 of the paper a sobering prognosis. “Unless drastic measures are taken immediately to put an end to the Hungarian government’s brutality 1,000,000 Hungarian Jews are doomed.” That same day page 1 of the paper reported that New York County’s Republican Committee had chosen to honor its leader by making “Yankee Dewey Dandy” its theme song. On June 2 the Times reported that the deadline for Budapest Jews to move into the ghettos had passed. It described the “ruthlessness” and the “confusion and terror” which prevailed and conveyed the news that “suicides apparently have been numerous” in thirty-six lines in the middle of page 6.17

  An equally bleak picture of the Hungarian Jews’ situation was offered readers of the Christian Science Monitor by its staff correspondent J. Emlyn Williams. According to him, sixty-five concentration camps had been established “to which Jews have been herded prior to transport to the execution camps of Poland.” “Confusion and terror” were said to reign within the community as the date of their deportation from Budapest drew near. On July 2 a twenty-line page 12 dispatch in the New York Times noted that the “final stage in the tragedy of Hungarian Jews” had begun. According to the article, which was based on “authoritative information,” 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been dispatched to a death camp in Poland called Auschwitz, and 350,000 more were expected to be put to death there by July 24.18 On July 13 the New York Times predicted that a group of 2,500 Hungarian Jews who had been taken from Hungary “will arrive in the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps by this week-end, . . . [where] railroad sidings have been constructed directly to the gassing halls in both establishments to expedite matters.”19 Despite the terrible and definitive nature of this information it was appended to a short article on how Hungarian children were being moved out of Budapest so that they would not be endangered by Allied bombs, an article whose headline gave no hint it contained information regarding death camps and gassing halls:

  BUDAPEST CHILDREN ORDERED EVACUATED

  Clearing of All Industrial Areas Planned to Escape Bombs20

  The Press Considers the Possibility of Rescue

  While the way the press handled the news did not change in the face of the Hungarian crisis, the editorial policy of many papers did change somewhat during this period. Beginning in the summer of 1943 and throughout the Hungarian crisis, growing numbers of papers began to argue that the Allies were at least partially culpable for their failure to rescue. This changing editorial policy was partially the result of the activities of the Bergson group and the mainline American Jewish Conference. They proposed rescue programs which called for opening Palestine to all Jews who could reach it, encouraging neutral countries to aid Jewish refugees, strong warnings to the Axis and its satellites that they would be punished for crimes against Jews or for preventing the escape of Jews, and establishing an intergovernmental agency to expand the work of rescuing Jews.21 The active editorial support of the New York Herald Tribune, all the Hearst papers, the New York Post, The New Republic and even The Christian Century, among others, for rescue programs was indicative of growing discomfort with the lack of an Allied response to the persecution of the Jews.22The Bergson group was particularly successful in mobilizing this support. It placed full-page ads in various journals and papers, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New Republic, and Nation, accusing the Allies of “cowardice” in failing to rescue the Jews. One ad carried this boldface headline:

  HOW WELL

  ARE YOU

  SLEEPING?

  Is There Something You Could Have Done to Save

  Millions of Innocent People—Men, Women,

  and Children—from Torture and Death?
23

  In mid-August, after meeting with Peter Bergson, Eleanor Roosevelt devoted her column “My Day” to the tragic plight of the Jews. Adhering to the official Allied line of “rescue through victory,” she did not recommend that anything specific be done to aid the victims. One of the most substantial publications on the question of rescue was a fifteen-page special section of The New Republic which appeared on August 30, 1943, and was entitled “The Jews of Europe: How to Help Them.” The New Republic argued that responsibility for the crimes against the Jews fell not only on the perpetrators but “on the whole of humanity . . . [including] the Allied States,” which had failed to take any “concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.”24 Bergson established ties with the publisher William Randolph Hearst. The Hearst chain became and remained active supporters of rescue activities, particularly those proposed by the Bergson group. On various occasions Hearst exhorted Americans to “Remember . . . THIS IS NOT A JEWISH PROBLEM. It is a HUMAN PROBLEM.” Though few Americans and even fewer publishers and editors of major American dailies ever perceived of the issue in these explicit terms, increasing numbers of dailies were slowly beginning to recognize that it was “up to the Allies” to do something.25*

  The burgeoning demand for action was intensified in November 1943 by a resolution introduced by Senator Guy M. Gillette and Representative Will Rogers, Jr., calling for the establishment of a commission to effect a plan to rescue European Jewry “from extinction.” Over twelve major dailies, including the Washington Star, Washington Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor, supported it.27 When Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long testified in secret before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he argued that a commission was unnecessary and defended the State Department’s record on rescue. He incorrectly told the assembled congressmen that 580,000 refugees had been admitted to the United States since 1933. He also claimed that the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees established at Evian had been revitalized at Bermuda and given a mandate to take all action necessary for rescue. In truth it did not even have an office in the United States and, contrary to his claims, was not authorized to negotiate with the Axis countries, something that was mandatory in order to effect rescue plans. On December 17 the London headquarters of the Intergovernmental Committee described Long’s remarks as “absolutely incorrect.” But Congress and the press accepted his claims, particularly about the immigration figures, at face value just as they had accepted similar claims at the time of Bermuda. The New York Times was so impressed that it broke with its usual practice of placing news regarding Jews on inner pages and ran the story on Long’s immigration figures in the upper half of the front page. The anti-immigration Chicago Tribune, a staunch foe of liberalizing immigration policies, charged that the quotas were being ignored.28