Even before the rally the question of rescue had been publicly raised by a small group of Palestinian Jews led by a man named Peter Bergson. Members of the Irgun, one of the secret Jewish armies in Palestine, they came to the United States to raise funds to support Irgun activities, including helping Jewish refugees break through the British blockade of Palestine. When news of the destruction of European Jewry began to be publicized, they turned their energies to that issue. From the outset they used the mass media effectively. Among their earliest activities was the publication on February 16, 1943, of a full-page ad in which they claimed that Roumania would not kill 70,000 Jews if it were paid 50 dollars a head. Though the principal demand of the ad, written by Ben Hecht, was the establishment of an Allied intergovernmental committee to “formulate ways and means of stopping this wholesale slaughter of human beings,” it was the idea of ransoming Roumanian Jewry which captured people’s attention. This was due in no small measure to the headline above the ad:
FOR SALE to Humanity
70,000 Jews
Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece
No sooner had the ad appeared than the established Jewish organizations accused the group of activities that bordered on “fraud” for making it sound as if a 50-dollar contribution to them could save a Roumanian Jew. The Bergsonites ignored the criticism and less than a week later published another ad signed by Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado demanding Allied action on the Roumanian proposal. Both these ads appeared in a number of different papers.10
In addition to their effective use of these dramatic full-page ads, they sponsored a star-laden pageant entitled “We Will Never Die.” Produced by Billy Rose, written by Ben Hecht, starring Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, directed by Moss Hart, with the NBC orchestra playing music composed for the pageant by Kurt Weill, the March 9 premier in New York City drew over 40,000. A second showing was hastily scheduled when 50,000 people descended on the Garden for tickets that, in the words of the organizers, “weren’t there.” Many people waited outside in the vain hope that a third performance would take place. The pageant was produced in five other American cities—Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, and Hollywood. It generated press coverage wherever it was shown and was ultimately seen by over 100,000 Americans including Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members, 300 congressmen and senators, diplomats, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who in her newspaper column, “My Day,” described it as
one of the most impressive and moving pageants I have ever seen. No one who heard each group come forward and give the story of what had happened to it at the hands of a ruthless German military, will ever forget those haunting words: “Remember us.”
The First Lady was obviously deeply moved by the performance, but not enough to suggest publicly that any action was possible.11
As the protest meetings gathered steam, some papers, led by the New York Times, became willing at least to consider the proposition made at the gatherings: something should and could be done prior to the end of the war. The Times, which in December had declared the world “helpless” to do anything, dramatically changed its stance and on March 3 called for the United States to “set a good example . . . in the interests of humanity” by revising “the chilly formalism of its immigration regulations.” That same day New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick, in one of the strongest columns to appear on the topic, called upon the Christian community “to do the utmost to rescue the Jews remaining in Europe.” Transcending the narrow confines of perceiving this as something of concern only to Jews, she declared the Jew the “symbol of what this war is about.” The New York Herald Tribune also devoted an editorial to this topic on the 3rd. Entitled “They Will Never Die,” it called attention to the pageant scheduled for the 9th and described it as a means of consecrating “the memory of men, women and children killed, not in combat, but in cold blood.” Though the New York Herald Tribune was not yet willing to recommend a rescue program, it would do so shortly. The Nation, New York Post, and New York Sun were among the other publications which called for action based on the proposals adopted at the Madison Square Garden rally. Also on March 3, Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles was asked at a press conference how the United States planned to aid those caught in the Nazi vise. The New York Times reporter at the conference described the question as being asked “in the light of the mass meeting” which had been held two days earlier. It was only after Welles was asked the question that the State Department released to the press a note, sent by Secretary of State Hull to the British on February 25, suggesting that the two countries convene a conference on the “refugee problem.”12
Obviously, as the date on the note indicates, the conference proposal preceded the rally. However, the rally and the subsequent pageant energized the press and other prominent personalities into asking whether it was really true that nothing could be done. The more they asked, the more politicians and bureaucrats recognized the growing political danger of appearing to do nothing. For the first time American political leaders began to sense that there was a potential political liability in inaction, hence their release of the note.
When Hull’s memorandum to the British, which contained suggestions for the “preliminary exploration” of the idea of holding a conference, was given to the press on March 3, the matter had already been under discussion for a few months at British instigation. The British, who had been the ones pressing America to act, accused Washington of publicizing the proposal in order to make “it appear that this [the American] Government had taken the initiative whereas the British Government had actually done so.” Sumner Welles, responding to the British argued that they wanted the impression to be created that [Britain] was the great outstanding champion of the Jewish people and the sole defender of the rights of freedom of religion and individual liberty and that it was being held back in its desire to undertake practical steps to protect the Jews in Europe . . . by the unwillingness of this Government.” In a strange reversal of their behavior in November and December 1942, the two governments were tripping over each other in their attempts to appear as the one with the better record in “assisting Jewish refugees.”13
Various papers, including the Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Herald Tribune, Miami Herald, New York World Telegram, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Philadelphia Bulletin, began to raise the question of action. Christian Century, which three months earlier had been pleased that no excess energy was being expended on this matter, now berated the British Parliament and American officials who had competed in December “to see who could express the most indignation at the Nazis’ despicable treatment of the Jews” but done “nothing.” The only devices to which they had resorted were “oratorical.” The following week Christian Century returned to the same theme and suggested that the United States, “which is shouting to high heaven about its manpower shortage,” might even consider taking in—“at least temporarily—some of the hunted ones.” The Catholic publication America, citing the Archbishop of Westminster’s message to the March 1 rally, called for “immediate action [and] . . . relief of every possible kind.” American Mercury, Reader’s Digest, Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times all ran articles by Ben Hecht decrying the American willingness to stand by silently. “Humanity has done almost nothing. Its indignation has been small. . . . It has shuddered and taken matters for granted.” In a column on the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, Hecht attributed the Germans’ success in murdering 2 million Jews who had neither “guns or sticks with which to defend themselves” not to German skill, but to humanity’s willingness to stick its “skull into a fog. Its nerve endings are apparently dead.”14
Even Newsweek, which had not paid too much attention to the issue, commented that Hitler’s recent prediction that the war would end with the “‘extinction of Jewry in Europe’ . . . sounded more like a promise than a threat and to a large extent is already in the process of being carried out.”15 Th
e Christian Science Monitor, demonstrating a greater sense of urgency than it ever had before, argued that none of the various plans will be of any “avail for Europe’s Jewish population unless some step is taken now.” Yet, still unwilling to abandon its balanced approach, it observed that there “are other refugees who need consideration, but the Jews seem to be in the most danger, and therefore perhaps call for more immediate attention.”16
On March 9 the Senate adopted a resolution which condemned the “atrocities inflicted upon the civilian population in the Nazioccupied countries, and especially the mass-murder of Jewish men, women and children,” and called for an immediate end to this “inexcusable slaughter.” But neither the Senate nor the House, which adopted the same resolution on March 18, proposed any steps or concrete action to be taken to aid those in duress.17 In fact the resolutions attracted little press attention. The New York Times devoted a few paragraphs on page 12 to the Senate’s action, and when the House subsequently passed its resolution, the Times put the three-paragraph story on page ll.18
The American indifference to rescue contrasts sharply with the mood of the British Parliament, many of whose members had been demanding since December that their government tell them whether the “claims of humanity come before your quota restrictions.” Between the December declaration by the Allied governments and the end of March, the Archbishops of Canterbury, York, and Wales publicly demanded on a number of occasions in the “name of the whole Anglical Episcopate” that the British government provide a sanctuary. Parliamentary calls for rescue were so persistent that Foreign Minister Anthony Eden complained to the Cabinet on February 22 that “it was becoming difficult” to satisfy the Parliament’s demands to know what was being done.19 Richard Law, the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, who would eventually be appointed to head the British delegation to Bermuda, warned the State Department in February that “public opinion in Great Britain has been rising to such a degree that the British Government can no longer remain dead [sic] to it.” According to Law, the British government found it unable to delay any longer “some reply to the persistent demands to know what it is doing to help the Jews.”20
The British press continued to pursue this issue with greater persistence than its American counterparts.21 Particularly noteworthy was the Manchester Guardian’s observation on February 16 that the report released by the British Section of the World Jewish Congress on the Nazi determination to speed up the annihilation of the Jews “confirms many of the details” which had previously been provided by the paper. For the Manchester Guardian the integrity of this news was not compromised by its source, a Jewish group.22
Even after London and Washington made public their plans to discuss the issue, English leaders continued to press for greater action. On March 24, when the Archbishop of Canterbury rose in the House of Lords to urge that the rescue of European Jews be expedited and that Jewish children in Bulgaria be transferred to Palestine, he was greeted with cheers. The House of Commons called an all-party conference which sent a message to Eden stressing the extreme urgency of the situation. It gave its strong support for immediate and generous action, compatible with the requirements of military operations, to provide help and temporary asylum for refugees.23
The only things comparable in this country were the rallies and pageants and the willingness of some papers to raise the issue of rescue. And these did make their impression. On March 23 the Secretary of State wrote to the President and cited the Madison Square Garden gathering and others like it as indicative of the “intense and widespread feeling on this subject” among “Jewish . . . [and] other elements of our population” and the need, therefore, for some response.24 When Eden conferred with Hull in Washington at the end of March, it was clear that from a political perspective further delay was intolerable. Finally, over three months after the December declaration and close to nine months after the first news of a systematic plan for the annihilation of the Jews had reached London, Britain and America prepared to convene a conference to seek ways to resolve the plight of the “refugees.”
The Bermuda Conference
In truth, the conference organizers were far less concerned with the plight of these identityless refugees than they were with their own plight: the intensifying demands from the press and leading religious and political personalities that something be done. This was a gathering—Henry Feingold has aptly described it as a “mock conference for surplus people”—which had a written and an unwritten goal. While the official purpose was to seek a means to rescue refugees, the unofficial but primary purpose was to placate public opinion. There is no question but that Bermuda was designed not to effect rescue, but to impress upon the world that all that could be done was being done. The press would serve as an important tool in Washington’s and London’s attempts to make this impression.
In their lengthy exchange of notes prior to the meeting, State Department and Foreign Office officials anticipated that they would be able to quell “public anxiety” over this issue by demonstrating that the two governments were concerned enough to “examine the problem and its possible solutions.” British and American officials agreed that a meeting would be useful to demonstrate “the practical limitations” faced by the Allies despite “their intense sympathy for the victims of Germany’s policy.”25 Their goal was to “let the . . . people and the world know [the Allies’] record in assisting Jewish refugees,” and not to devise new and dramatic methods of rescue. Long before the conference was publicly announced, both governments privately acknowledged that if the “main result” of the gathering would be only to “elicit full statements” on what was already being done and the difficulties in trying to doing more, “this in itself would be of great value.”26
In order to quell public anxiety, British and American officials knew that it was mandatory that they not only strictly control the information released to the press, but that they try to mold the perceptions of the press regarding what could be anticipated from the gathering. Both the British and Americans recognized that if public expectations were high and the conference accomplished nothing concrete, the propaganda costs would be great. And expectations were high. When the conference opened, the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York World Telegram all expressed the conviction that something could and should be done. The New York Times argued that even though “nothing, not even the desperate plight of the refugees,” could interfere with the war, measures “can be devised that go beyond palliatives which appear to be designed to assuage the conscience of the reluctant rescuers rather than to aid the victims.” The New York Herald Tribune observed that days of mourning and pious expressions of sympathy were pointless unless they were “also [a] dynamic stimulus to action.” The New York World Telegram declared that the “time for ‘exploratory’ conferences, verbal denunciations and promises of future punishment is past.”27
In addition to these calls for action, the conference also had to contend with a deep-seated skepticism. Freda Kirchwey, publisher of The Nation and an outspoken critic of the State Department’s rescue policy, deprecated the “modest step” of a conference even before it began and reminded readers that this meeting was not called “because our government felt impelled to do something about the greatest crime committed in our generation,” but because of the public pressure as exemplified by the March rallies. Nonetheless, she urged, “let’s have the conference,” and let the “restrained and practical” proposals adopted at the Madison Square Garden rally on March 1 serve as guidelines.28
Washington and London, well aware of both the high expectations and the skepticism, did not want to risk exacerbating the very situation that Bermuda had been designed to resolve. In the days prior to the opening of the meeting, whenever officials met with reporters they repeatedly stressed certain themes which then appeared in all the news stories about the meeting: Bermuda was a first step, it was exploratory, and therefore not much should be expected from it; there were tremend
ous problems which made previctory rescue virtually impossible despite the Allies’ best intentions; and—lest they be accused of shirking their responsibility—America and Britain had already done a great deal for the refugee victims of Nazi Germany. On the eve of the meeting an unnamed “high authority” told the press that a total of 600,000 European political refugees had been “permitted to enter the United States since Hitler came to power ten years ago.” Kingsbury Smith, INS correspondent in Washington, observed that this was “one of the main reasons why further mass movements of European refugees to this country in the near future will be opposed” at Bermuda.29 An AP dispatch on the conference observed that the United States, which was “beginning to feel the pinch of wartime shortages, is sheltering more than 500,000 refugees” from German controlled countries.30 The message was clear: the problem was great but the United States had done its share and more. The British stressed the same theme. Richard Law told the press that “it would be extremely difficult to find any place in the British Empire for victims of Axis persecution.” Again and again readers were told that refugee aid was “linked to victory in war” and therefore substantial relief was “not possible now.”31
The prominent journalist Raymond Clapper reiterated the official line regarding the conference and described it as “largely an exploratory affair” from which few concrete decisions could be expected. At best it might recommend a program for “future consideration.” He even echoed what we now know were some American and British officials’ deepest fears: that Germany would decide not to kill multitudes of Jews, but to release them. In 1943 British officials expressed their fears to the State Department that Germany might “change over from a policy of extermination to one of extrusion and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.” In 1944 both British and American officials worried that “Germans might play the card of offering an unmanageable number of refugees to the United Nations.” Clapper expressed this same concern. If Germany were to offer to free refugees, this would, he argued, have to be turned down because “no move of that kind [would be made] from humanitarian motives, but only for military reasons that would benefit Germany.” This would be a way for Germany to unload its “excess population on the Allies.”32
Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 Page 24