Beyond Belief
Page 28
On June 20 the New York Times devoted twenty-two lines in the middle of page 5 to the news that 7,000 Czech Jews had been “dragged to gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oswiecim,” where they were “killed en masse.” That same day an even shorter Reuters dispatch on the 7,000 appeared in the Washington Times Herald. On June 25 the New York Times reported that “new mass executions” by gas had taken place at Auschwitz in recent weeks. The news was contained in thirty-three lines on page 5 of the paper.57
It was during the first ten days of July that the real extent of the horror that had been perpetrated in this place was reported by the press, but treated with great equanimity if not disinterest. When the same news based on the same eyewitness report was released four months later by the War Refugee Board and not, as was the case in June and July, by refugee organizations or governments in exile, it shocked the press in a way that it had not been shocked since Kristallnacht. Then dozens of papers published articles and editorials on the news.58 One of the reasons the War Refugee Board report may have had more impact was that it contained the complete report on Auschwitz. The earlier version had only been an eight-page summary. Nonetheless, the information released to the press in the summer contained the most critical information regarding Auschwitz and clearly indicated the scope of the tragedy taking place there.
The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times Herald, Seattle Times, Washington Star, Kansas City Star, and PM were among those papers which, during the first ten days of July, reported the details of this killing center. The reports varied in length and detail—though most tended to be short—but all included one basic piece of information: between April 1942 and April 1944, when the eyewitnesses escaped, approximately 1.5 to 1.7 million Jews had been killed at Auschwitz and its satellite camp Birkenau. Most papers cited the Swiss-based European relief agencies, the International Church Movement Ecumenical Refugee Commission, and the Fluchtingshilfe as their source for this information.59
As was so often the case during this period, of all the major dailies the New York Times had the most extensive information, but despite the magnitude of the horror, it was never on the front page. On July 3 the paper provided its readers with a list of the number of Jews “eradicated” in these camps, “excluding hundreds of thousands slain elsewhere.” There neatly listed midway down the center column of page 3 were the grim statistics:
Poland ..................................................................
900,000
Netherlands .................................
100,000
Greece ......................................
45,000
France ......................................
150,000
Belgium .....................................
50,000
Germany ....................................
60,000
Yugoslavia, Italy, and Norway ..................
50,000
Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria .................
30,000
Slovakia .....................................
30,000
Foreign Jews from various camps in Poland ......
300,000
To this number, the New York Times reporter noted, “must now be added Hungary’s Jews. About 30 percent of the 400,000 there have been slain or have died en route to Upper Silesia [Auschwitz].” The article described how prisoners were “ordered to strip for bathing” and then taken to rooms into which “cyanide gas” was released. Death came in three to five minutes, after which the bodies were burned.60
The Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Evening Star carried slightly abbreviated versions of the New York Times report, while the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times Herald carried highly truncated ones. The AP dispatch, used by most of the dailies which reported this news, was based on the New York Times story. The Los Angeles Times placed the report on page 5. The article referred to the number of victims as being between 1.5 and 1.75 million, but the headline cited the smaller figure of 1.5 million. It made no mention of gas chambers and claimed that the Jews were killed by being given a shot of phenol “near the heart.”61 The Washington Times Herald’s ten-line report stated that between 1.5 and 1.75 million Jews had been “put to death by gas or other methods.” The headline over the story made no reference to a precise number and identified all the Jews killed as Polish:
REPORTS SLAUGHTER OF POLISH JEWS62
The New York Times continued to pursue this story, but in its own restrained fashion. On page 6 of the July 6 edition of the paper, reporter Daniel Brigham described how the information on Auschwitz had been obtained and verified. Brigham noted that if Hungarian Jews had been included in the toll of those killed, it “would lie somewhere around the 2,000,000 mark.” But, he noted, those who died en route to the camp were not “to be pitied,” for those who survived had to endure a “living hell.”63
On the same day twenty lines on page 3 in the New York Herald Tribune were devoted to the news that the 100,000 Hungarian Jews who had been deported on May 15 were now being “put to death in gas chambers at Oswiecim.” On July 7 the Washington Post devoted twenty-four lines to the news that Poland had become a Jewish “abbatoir.”64
Once again the Christian Science Monitor chose to treat the story of European Jewry in a unique way. It certainly did not ignore the tragedy. On July 3 and again on July 9 the paper mentioned the death toll at Auschwitz and the fate of Hungarian Jews. But on July 6, while the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and PM were describing the method of killing, the Christian Science Monitor ran a lengthy page 1 exclusive on what had happened to the Jews of Roumania. The story contended that the “burden of persecution” had fallen mainly on the poor Jews of Roumania, while the rich managed to retain “a large measure of their wealth . . . and even some political influence.” These “wealthy upper-crust” Jews were mainly intent on “safeguarding their wealth,” though they did send some clothes to those Jews who had been deported to Transnistria, the Roumanian-controlled area between the Dniester and Bug rivers. This aid amounted to “no more than a drop in the limitless . . . sorrow,” but, the reporter surmised, it may have “helped to save a few individual lives and salve more consciences.” According to the Christian Science Monitor reporter, these Jews had found the means to continue to run their businesses and enterprises even under an antisemitic regime. This story began on page 1 and covered almost 40 percent of a subsequent page, while the shorter article on the toll of 1.75 million appeared on page 7.65
Continuing with this theme, a month later in an article on the Hungarian situation the Christian Science Monitor reported that “32 members of the wealthiest Hungarian Jewish business families” had arrived in Portugal in a special German aircraft with forged entry visas. According to the article, a Christian Science Monitor exclusive, this group had been taken from Budapest to Stuttgart in a special train and then flown to Lisbon “while less happily-situated Jews in Hungary were reportedly being deported by the thousands to the notorious Nazi ‘extermination camp’ at Oswiecim in Poland.” The Christian Century treated the story similarly.66
* * *
By late summer 1944 even those papers which had paid some attention to the Hungarian story had generally abandoned it. First, though, in July and August there was brief but limited interest in an offer by the Hungarians to release some Jews. Most papers never seriously considered the offer and generally dismissed it out of hand.67 When it seemed increasingly certain that the deportations from Hungary would be completed and that over 200,000 Jews still in Budapest were in imminent danger, there was a last flurry of calls for rescue. The New York Times proposed that Hungarian cities and towns be retaliated against if the “murders do not stop.” Anne O’Hare McCormick, the New York Times columnist, attacked those who argued that Hungarian Jews’ fate was “hopeless.” She believed that s
ince the Nazis stood on the brink of defeat, they and their allies would be more inclined to abandon this policy, particularly if they knew its ramifications. There had to be serious and sustained “protests [and] demands” that rescue be initiated not just to save Jews “from death . . . but to save ourselves from ignominy.”68
The Nation proposed that temporary asylum be provided refugees in neutral countries and that Palestine be opened to Jewish immigration.69 The New Republic suggested that the United States and Britain give these “unhappy victims” the protection of American or British citizenship.70 Alexander Uhl, PM’s foreign editor, called for rescue efforts to be mounted through neutral countries and for the British to facilitate immigration to Palestine.71 Paul Winkler, columnist for the Washington Post, suggested the creation of Allied-backed “visas for somewhere,” which would serve as guarantees that the Allies would ensure that the refugee reached some safe haven. This, he argued, would encourage neutral countries bordering on Nazi-controlled lands to admit more Jews, and would aid more Jews than just those who might reach free ports.72
Jewish groups also called for action.73 A massive rally was held in Madison Square Garden on July 31. Despite the heat, over 40,000 people attended. Those who could not find seats packed the surrounding streets. The rally was designed to pressure the government to act, but the press paid it and subsequent efforts only cursory attention. When President Roosevelt and Governor Dewey sent messages to the rally expressing their “abhorrence” of Nazi behavior, I. F. Stone suggested in PM that they were doing nothing more than indulging in a “sentimental gesture,” since they condemned the Nazis but refused to actively support American efforts which would save lives. Rescue, Stone argued, was possible but neither Britain nor America was willing to “provide . . . a destination” for those who might be saved.74
Though the New York Post, The Nation, the Washington Post, the Hearst papers, and The New Republic all insisted that “no effort should be spared” in order to save those who faced deportation, there was desperation and futility in the air. This was exemplified by the attitude of The New Republic, one of the first journals in the United States to argue that rescue before victory was not only possible but a moral imperative. The New Republic, which exactly a year earlier had published an entire section on how to help the Jews of Europe, now admitted that it did not seem likely that much could be done and mused that in all likelihood the “delivery of Hungary’s Jews will come through military liberation rather than evacuation.”75 To all intents and purposes the story of Hungarian Jewry was over and this passionate advocate of saving Jews seemed to know it. Despite the Allied condemnations and the press calls for action, little was accomplished by the Allies to save Hungary’s Jews. They were dispatched to their death in the same manner that so many of their co-religionists had been murdered in the preceding years.
Even as some papers reported each step in the ghettoization, deportation, and murder of Hungarian Jews, the press in general was beginning to tell a much happier tale: the liberation of Europe. Though it would be a while before the guns were totally silenced and all those in danger—Jew and non-Jew—were safe, reporters were already beginning to discover that in most of the places liberated by Allied armies there were no Jews left. After returning from Minsk, Edmund Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor reported on CBS that there remained “only 25 or 30 Jews where there were once nearly 30,000.” According to Stevens the “rest were in nearby ditches.”76 A Soviet writer returned from the liberated portions of Poland; he had “heard many groans and seen many tears in Poland but no groans or tears of Jews,” for “there are no Jews in Poland.”77 When Rome was liberated, the Italian paper Il Tempo estimated that out of a prewar Jewish population in Rome of 11,000, 6,000 had “vanished.” There were reported to be 5,000 Jews surviving in Germany out of a prewar population of 500,000, and 180 in Vienna out of a prewar total of 150,000. For those few Jews who had miraculously managed to survive, “life ha[d] been very cruel.” In a dispatch from a liberated Paris, New York Times reporter Raymond Daniell wrote of the few surviving Jews in that city that “no where else . . . is the mark of Nazism so indelibly printed as it is on the faces of these folk.” On August 30 a UP report in the Washington Post estimated that only fifteen of the approximately 50,000 Jews of prewar Pinsk were “alive today.”78
One cannot attribute the paucity of press coverage on Hungarian Jews to skepticism. It may have been that by the summer of 1944 most journalists had simply tired of this story even though they had never really paid it much attention. It was a familiar tale, and its very familiarity rendered it unworthy of page 1 or even page 10. It is possible that if the press had raised a major outcry, nothing would have happened. The Allies were as intent on adhering to a policy of rescue through victory as the Nazis were intent on destroying the remnants of European Jewry before their defeat. They would soon begin the terrible death marches designed to keep surviving Jews from falling into the hands of the liberating forces. But the press does not decide how it will treat a story on the basis of whether attention to a topic will effect a change in policy. The press pays attention to those stories it considers significant. And even at this late date for much of the American press this news was still a minor “sidelight.”
11
Against Belief
Since the onset of Nazi rule Americans had greeted almost all the news of Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews skeptically. Inevitably, their first reaction was to question whether it was true. Before, during, and even after the war many Americans, including those associated with the press, refused to believe the news they heard.
The “Show Me” Syndrome
In September 1942 Vernon McKenzie, writing in Journalism Quarterly, decried Americans’ tendency to dismiss all reports of atrocities as propaganda. He blamed an American “attitude of cynicism” which prompted many people to declare that they would “not be such simpletons that they would be fooled again” as they had been by the much publicized but false atrocity stories of World War I. In a January 1943 Gallup poll nearly 30 percent of those asked dismissed the news that 2 million Jews had been killed in Europe as just a rumor. Another 24 percent had no opinion on the question. Informal polls taken by the Detroit Free Press and the New York Post in 1943 found that a broad range of Americans did not believe the atrocity reports.1
Journalists who had been stationed in Germany were among those most distressed by the American refusal to believe that the Germans were engaging in physical persecution. In March 1943 William Shirer, writing in the Washington Post, castigated the public for thinking that the stories of the atrocities were untrue or had been magnified for “propaganda purposes.” He attributed this attitude to a “silly sort of supercynicism and superskepticism” which persisted despite the fact that there was “no earthly reason” for people not to believe. These doubts were not, of course, a new phenomenon. When Shirer was a reporter in Berlin, “most of the Americans who visited Germany in the early Nazi days used to say: ‘The Nazis can’t really be as bad as you correspondents paint them.’ ” Shirer found the persistence of disbelief particularly inexplicable in light of the fact that the Nazis had themselves admitted the truth of some of the atrocities and that many others had been committed in public view.2
In April 1943 Dorothy Thompson, in her column “On the Record,” decried the American conviction that atrocity stories were either “merely propaganda” or “greatly exaggerated.”3 In January 1944 Arthur Koestler also expressed his frustration that so many people refused to believe that the “grim stories of Nazi atrocities are true.” Writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Koestler cited public opinion polls in the United States in which nine out of ten average Americans dismissed the accusations against the Nazis as propaganda lies and flatly stated that they did not believe a word of them. How, he wondered, could Americans be convinced that this “nightmare” was reality? The Christian Century responded to Koestler by arguing that there really was no point in “screaming�
�� about the atrocities against the Jews because this would only “emotionally exhaust” those who wanted to devote their energies “after” the war to “building peace.” In another one of the magazine’s long line of disparaging comments about the Jewish community, the article castigated “people who claim to be more aroused about this mass killing of Jews in Europe than the rest of us, . . . [and who] seem to want more committees.” Koestler, the journal graciously acknowledged, was “too honest a person” to be among those who were the “screamers.”4
Even members of the armed forces vigorously dismissed the accounts of horror. Saturday Evening Post editor Edgar Snow related how an American flyer who had just returned from bombing the German lines emphatically stated that “he didn’t believe all that ‘propaganda’ about Nazi brutality.” This soldier, who was typical of many of his colleagues, was convinced that it was “probably all lies” designed to convince Americans of the enemy’s nefarious ways. Moreover, soldiers argued, there was no real difference between Axis and Allied forces. “They say they are fighting for an ideal and they are ready to die for it, and that’s just what we’re doing.” A newspaperman who was serving in the armed forces wrote that the “boys” in uniform got “vastly more indignant about gasoline rationing than they do about the slaughter of civilians.” Koestler, who had been lecturing to the troops since 1941, also found that the men in uniform didn’t believe in “the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec. You can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defense begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex.”5