Beyond Belief

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  There are those who are inclined to suggest that little was done because of contempt the Allies harbored for these particular victims because they were Jews. One is loath to accept that as true, but it must be acknowledged that many government officials, members of the press, and leaders of other religions behaved as if Jewish lives were a cheap commodity.113 The government and the press reacted much more forcefully when non-Jewish lives were threatened. The Allies allowed food to be shipped through enemy lines to Axis-occupied Greece because the population was starving. They rejected requests from Jewish groups that the same be done for Jews in Eastern Europe. The Americans claimed that they had no means to transport Jews to safety at the same time that cargo ships were returning from Europe with empty holds. The press was far more outraged over Lidice and the killing of European resistance fighters than it was over any similar action against Jews. When Jewish fighters in Warsaw managed to hold the Germans at bay, most of the press simply ignored the fact.

  A real antipathy toward Jews certainly affected the Allied response. While no one among the Allies or in the press wanted to see Jews killed, virtually no one was willing to advocate that steps be taken to try to stop the carnage. Many Allied officials in positions of power in London and Washington were tired of hearing about Jews and even more tired of being asked to do something about them even though there were steps that could have been taken. In 1942 British officials described eyewitness accounts of massacres as “familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.” In 1944 another official complained that “a disproportionate amount of the time of the [Foreign] Office is wasted dealing with these wailing Jews.” In 1944 State Department officials warned Hull that the War Refugee Board should be restrained in its rescue efforts lest “Hitler take advantage of the offer to embarrass the United Nations at this time by proposing to deliver thousands of refugees.”114 The most efficacious thing for the Allies to do was to try to ignore the tragedy and make sure that those whose responsibility it was to disseminate information did the same. And the press, having convinced itself that there was nothing that could be done and having inured itself to the moral considerations of what was happening, followed suit. It was a cumulative and collective failure. The press was ultimately as culpable as the government.

  There is, of course, no way of knowing whether anything would have been different if the press had actively pursued this story. The press did not have the power to stop the carnage or to rescue the victims. The Allies might have remained just as committed to inaction, even if they had been pressured by the press. But in a certain respect that is not the question one must ask. The question to be asked is did the press behave in a responsible fashion? Did it fulfill its mandate to its readers?

  Many years ago Alexis de Tocqueville praised the press in large and populous nations such as America for its ability to unite people who share certain beliefs about an issue but, because they feel “insignificant and lost amid the crowd,” cannot act alone. According to Tocqueville the press fulfills its highest purpose when it serves as a “beacon” to bring together people who other wise might ineffectively seek each other “in darkness.” Newspapers can bring them “together and . . . keep them united.” If there were no newspapers or if newspapers failed to do their task, he observed, “there would be no common activity.”115 There is no way of knowing whether the American people would have ever been aroused enough to demand action to rescue Jews. But we can categorically state that most of the press refused to light its “beacon,” making it virtually certain that there would be no public outcry and no “common activity” to try to succor this suffering people.

  The press had access to a critically important and unprecedented story. Yet it reacted with equanimity and dispassion. In these pages I have analyzed and explained its skepticism; I find it much more difficult—if not impossible—to fully comprehend its indifference. That indifference may be a part of the history of the Holocaust which, despite the efforts of scores of historians, will remain unfathomable. We still cannot answer the question that Malcolm Bingay’s colleagues asked one another as they saw the remains of the Nazis’ work—”how creatures, shaped like human beings, can do such things.” Nor can we explain how the world of bystanders—particularly those with access to the news—were able to treat this information with such apathy. Both the Final Solution and the bystanders’ equanimity are beyond belief.

  Today we do not doubt that millions of people can be massacred, systematically and methodically, or that millions more can bear witness and do nothing. Over the past forty years we have lost our innocence and have become inured not only to the escalating cycle of human horror but also to the human indifference. Then the news shocked and confounded us. Today similar news, whether it come from Biafra, Cambodia, Uganda, or any one of a number of other places, does not shock us and sometimes it does not even interest us. It has become an “old,” all too familiar, and therefore relatively unexciting story.

  Our reaction is among the more tragic legacies of the Final Solution. The inability of reports of extreme persecution and even mass murder in foreign lands to prompt us to act almost guarantees that the cycle of horror which was initiated by the Holocaust will continue.

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  NOTES

  Key to Abbreviations

  Abbreviations are used for three frequently cited sources after their first full citation in notes:

  DGFP Documents on German Foreign Policy, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington

  DS Department of State Decimal Files, in the National Archives, Washington

  FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington

  Introduction

  1. Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, quoted in James E. Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 52-53; Oscar Wilde, quoted in James Reston, The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 43; Adlai Stevenson, quoted in Thomas Bailey, The Art of Diplomacy (New York: Appleton, 1968), p. 124.

  2. Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1967); Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970); David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Saul Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Towards Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973); Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).

  Recently additional attention has been devoted to the behavior of the organized Jewish community in research projects that are themselves somewhat controversial. Critics such as Lucy Dawidowicz have accused factions in the Jewish community of “revis[ing] the past for their own self-aggrandizement and unscrupulously distort[ing] the historic record” in order to justify and legitimize their current political agenda. The appointment of a private, blue-ribbon Commission on the Holocaust under the chairmanship of Arthur J. Goldberg, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, which was charged with the task of “embark[ing] on a searing inquiry into the actions and attitudes of American Jews,” aroused a great deal of controversy. Lucy Dawidowicz accurately described this charge as sounding like an “arraignment.” Lucy Dawidowicz, “American Jewry and the Holocaust,�
� New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1982, pp. 47-48, 101-114. See also Marie Syrkin, “American Jewry During the Holocaust,” Midstream, October 1982, pp. 6-12. A few years ago Ariel Sharon, in an address to the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, accused the Jews of the free world of having remained silent during the war. Bernard Wasserstein, “The Myth of ‘Jewish Silence.’ “ Midstream, August-September 1980, p. 10. Monty Noam Penkower, “In Dramatic Dissent: The Bergson Boys,” American Jewish History, March 1981, pp. 281-309; David Wyman, “Letters to the Editor,” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 1982, p. 94. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews offers the most piercing analysis of the American Jewish community’s reaction.

  3. Elmer Roper, You and Your Leaders (New York, Morrow, 1957), p. 71; Selig Adler, Isolationist Impulse (London, Abelard-Schuman, 1957), p. 279.

  4. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 1. One foreign policy official described the function of the press as giving those in government a “daily feel” of the public’s reaction to events. Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 233-234. The fact that reporters see themselves as the public’s agents in breaking down any barriers which might impede the free flow of news also enhances the press’s importance in the foreign policy arena. Reston, p. 71; Theodore Peterson, “The Social Responsibility Theory of the Press,” in Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 91; Cohen, p. 32; William O. Chittick, State Department, Press and Pressure Groups: A Role Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1970), p. 6; Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, 1954), pp. 93-115, and Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication (Glencoe, Ill., 1955), chap. 14, and pp. 32-33, 325, as cited in Peter G. Filene, “On Method and Matter,” chap. 1 in his Americans and the Soviet Experience, 1917-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). Also see Filene pp. 1-7, for a discussion of some of the problems involved in analysis of mass media.

  For an example of a veteran reporter’s reaction to the barring of his colleagues from the battlefield see Drew Middleton, “Barring Reporters from the Battlefield,” New York Times Magazine, February 5, 1984, pp. 36-37, 61 ff. For an analysis of the political impact of television see Austin Ranney, Channels of Power: The Impact of Television on American Politics (New York, 1984), as cited in Ted Koppel, “The Myth of the Medium,” New Republic, February 6, 1984, pp. 26-28; A. Lawrence Chickering, “The Media and the Message,” Commentary, February 1984, pp. 79-80.

  5. Cohen, p. 255; Reston, pp. 75-76.

  6. Frederick Oeschner, This Is the Enemy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), p. 130.

  7. W. Phillips Davison, “More than Diplomacy,” in Lester Markel et al., Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1949), p. 132; Reston, pp. 69-71. Incidentally, because press criticism of government policy often tends to influence policy via an intellectual, political, and journalistic elite and not through the masses, the number of people who read a particular publication is often less important than who reads it.

  8. Graham J. White, FDR and the Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 13, 22, 135; Raymond Clapper, Watching the World (New York: Whittlesey House, 1944), p. 51; Arthur Krock, Memoirs (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1970), p. 183; Reston, pp. 67-68; Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduction by Jonathan Daniels (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972); James E. Pollard, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Press,” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 3 (September 1947), p. 201.

  9. Reston, pp. 67-68.

  10. The Press Information Bulletins are to be found in Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y., White, pp. 79-81; James Reston, “The Number One Voice,” in Markel, p. 70; Pollard, p. 200; H. V. Kaltenborn, Fifty Fabulous Years (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1950), p. 172.

  11. Chittick, pp. 24-25.

  12. For examples of German concerns regarding American press coverage see: Richard Sallet to the Ministry of Propaganda, August 3, 1934, no. 569, III A 3140, Documents on German Foreign Policy (hereafter cited as DGFP), series C, III (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), p. 1111; Luther, April 8, 1935, DGFP, series C, IV, pp. 23-29; Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Hearings Before the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 73d Cong., 2d sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1935); memorandum of a conversation between Ambassador Hugh Wilson and Joseph Goebbels, Berlin March 22, 1938, enclosed in a letter from Sumner Welles to President Roosevelt, April 22, 1938, Hugh Wilson folder, President’s Secretary’s File, Germany, FDRL, as cited in Sander Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 36. For additional discussion of German attempts to sway American public opinion and press coverage, see Chapter 6.

  13. Thomsen to Berlin, November 20, 1939, no. 684, DGFP, series D, VIII, p. 432, as quoted in Saul Friedlander, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States, 1939-1941 (New York, Alfred E. Knopf, 1967), p. 56.

  14. Reston, Artillery, p. 65; Friedlander, pp. 42-43, 52. For American attempts to influence the press see: Messersmith to Hull, March 25, 1933, DS 862.4016/496, as cited in Shlomo Shafir, “The Impact of the Jewish Crisis on American German Relations, 1933-1939,” Ph.D. diss. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1971), p. 77; Messersmith to Hull, March 31, 1933, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers (hereafter cited as FRUS), 1933, vol. II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), pp. 341, 346; telephone call between Phillips and Gordon, April 2, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II, p. 346.

  15. For contemporary discussion of the evolution of these two fields and bibliographies see Harold G. Lasswell, “Propaganda,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, Macmillan, 1934), vol. 12, pp. 521-528; Leila A. Sussmann, “The Public Relations Movement in America,” M.A. diss., University of Chicago, 1947; and Harwood L. Childs, ed., “Pressure Groups and Propaganda,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 179 (May 1935)—all as cited in Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 141, 211, n. 52.

  16. In 1908 Congress stipulated in an appropriations bill that the government was to use no funds for “the preparation of any newspaper or magazine articles.” In 1913, after investigating the public relations activities of federal agencies, Congress passed a law prohibiting the government’s use of funds for “publicity experts.” But the law was the last futile attempt to try to stop what would soon become an accepted government activity. Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928), p. 27; F. B. Marbut, News from the Capital (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 192-196, all as cited in Schudson, p. 139, 141.

  17. George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Row, 1920), p. 4; Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York: Peter Smith, 1927), p. 20; and James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939)—all as cited in Schudson, p. 212.

  18. J. Roth, World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 109.

  19. Lasswell, “Propaganda,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 18, p. 582, as cited in Markel, p. 15.

  20. Schudson, p. 142.

  21. Ibid., pp. 156-57; Leo C. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), p. 351. For an argument in favor of objectivity see Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929, reprinted ed., Time Incorporated, 1964), pp. 222-224.

  22. Donald F. Drummond, The Passing of American Neutrality, 1937-1941 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955); William L. Langer and S. Ever
ett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations/Harper & Row, 1952).

  23. Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939 (London: Oxford, 1971), pp. 1-32; Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 241-242.

  24. Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: An Uncompromising Look at the New York Times (New York: Times Books, 1980), p. xi.

  25. Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble, as quoted in Gannon, p. xiv.

  Chapter 1

  1. Sackett to Hull, March 9, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II, pp. 206-209. For examples of some of the early laws see “Law for the Restoration of the Regular Civil Service,” Reichsgesetzblatt, 34, April 4, 1933, and “First Decree with Reference to the Law for the Restoration of the Regular Civil Service,” Reichsgesetzblatt, 37, April 11, 1933; reprinted in The Jews in Nazi Germany: The Factual Record of Their Persecution by the National Socialists (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1933), pp. 1-2.

  2. The Jews in Nazi Germany, p. 21. For typical examples of coverage which did not focus on Nazi antisemitism see New York Herald Tribune, March 1, 1933, p. 1, March 2, 1933, p. 1, and New York Times, March 6, 1933, p. 1.

  3. H. R. Knickerbocker, New York Evening Post, April 15, 1933, as cited in The Jews in Nazi Germany, pp. 24-27.