This confusion regarding what was going on in Europe did not really dissipate with either the passage of time or the release of more information. In October 1944 Averell Harriman, American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, felt compelled to reassure the press that the reports of massacres and atrocities committed by the Germans and their supporters in Russian territory “have not been and cannot be exaggerated.” Though a December 1944 Gallup poll revealed that 76 percent of those queried now believed that many people had been “murdered” in concentration camps, the estimates they gave of the number who had died indicated that they had not really grasped the scope of the tragedy. Furthermore, while more Americans were now willing to believe that many people had been killed, they generally did not believe in the existence of gas chambers and death camps.6
By the final weeks of the war increasing numbers of reporters and columnists were complaining about the public’s unshakable doubts. In April 1945 Washington Post correspondent Edward Folliard observed that on the basis of his experiences with American forces, “where atrocities are concerned most Americans are skeptics . . . they have to be shown” to believe and most of them had apparently not yet seen enough.7 Syndicated columnist Marquis Childs criticized Americans who “put down to ‘propaganda’ the latest reports of murder factories.”8 Paul Winkler described his frustration in trying to convey to the “ever-skeptical masses” the proof of “Teutonic bestiality.” Henry J. Taylor of the New York World Telegram and the Scripps-Howard newspapers, declared it “incredible that there should be any doubt at home about the truth of the Nazis’ wholesale atrocities,” but there were. Taylor observed that “in the last war only a few of the German atrocity stories were true, yet most of them were believed. In this war the atrocity stories are true yet few seem to be believed.”9
But doubts still persisted even at the very end of the war after American soldiers, reporters, editors, publishers, and members of Congress had seen camps and after the Army Signal Corps screened a movie on the atrocities in American theaters. In May 1945, upon his return from visiting the camps, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher and editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, wrote “A Report to the American People,” in which he described Buchenwald and Dachau. He began this lengthy article by expressing his dismay at finding that there were still Americans who were saying, “this talk of atrocities is all propaganda.” On May 5, 1945, Editor & Publisher recommended that all newspapers devote as much space as possible to pictures of Nazi atrocities. The magazine acknowledged that “for years all Americans” had found it difficult to believe the atrocity stories. But even after these stories had been verified by war correspondents, some Americans had “built up such immunity to what they call propaganda that they still refuse to believe it.” Some of the soldiers who participated in the liberation of the camps took pictures of what they saw. When they returned to the United States, they found that people were impressed by the fact that the photographs were not “official” pictures taken by the Army Signal Corps, but were photos by an “amateur photographer in which there could be no doctoring of scenes and no faking of film.” Other soldiers returned to find that even their own pictures did not convince people. “They said it’s propaganda.” One G.I. who was at Dachau told his parents what he saw “and they didn’t know what the hell I was talkin’ about.” From that point on, he “rarely mentioned” his experience.10
There were critics who argued that the reports, photographs, and films detailing what had been found in the camps were being released in order to implant in the American public a feeling of vengeance. James Agee, writing in The Nation of May 19, 1945, attacked the films even though he had not seen them—he did not believe “it necessary” to do so. “Such propaganda”—even if true—was designed to make Americans equate all Germans with the few who perpetrated these crimes. Milton Mayer, in an article in The Progressive, went a step further than Agee. He not only argued against vengeance but questioned whether the films and reports could really be true. “There are to be sure fantastic discrepancies in the reports.”11
This attitude was not unique to America. The English public was also difficult to convince. In the April 28, 1945, edition of the New Statesman and Nation an article decried the people “who don’t believe, don’t even now believe and say that this is merely a newspaper stunt, or is government propaganda.” In mid-April 1945 BBC officials, well aware of listeners’ inclination to dismiss any reports of atrocities as “propaganda,” broadcast Edward R. Murrow’s famous depiction of Buchenwald rather than that of their own BBC reporter. They did so because they believed that the British public, which held Murrow in high esteem, would not reject information broadcast by him as government-inspired atrocity tales.12
The Responsibility of the Press
Though a number of columnists and reporters complained about these doubts as the war neared its end, the fact is that the press bears a great measure of responsibility for the public’s skepticism and ignorance of the scope of the wartime tragedy. The public’s doubts were strengthened and possibly even created by the manner in which the media told the story. If the press did not help plant the seeds of doubt in readers’ minds, it did little to eradicate them. In the pages that follow we shall examine how, as the war neared its end, editors and reporters tried to explain their treatment of the news.
During the war journalists frequently said that the news of deportations and executions did not come from eyewitnesses who could personally confirm what had happened and therefore, as journalists, they were obliged to treat it skeptically. This explanation is faulty because much of the information came from German statements, broadcasts, and newspapers. If anything, these sources would have been inclined to deny, not verify, the news.13 Neutral sources also affirmed the reliability of the reports. Moreover, even when the press did encounter witnesses, it often dismissed what they had to say because they were not considered “reliable” or “impartial.”
The victims themselves recognized the difficulty they faced in piercing the barriers of incredulity. A Polish underground courier who, in August 1944, reached London with news of the stepped-up pace of the slaughter of Hungarian Jews was shocked to find that despite the fact that he brought news from within Auschwitz itself, “nobody will believe.” As late as 1944 eyewitness accounts—particularly those of victims—were not considered irrefutable evidence even if they came from independent sources and corroborated one another. The press often categorized them as prejudiced or exaggerated. At the end of the war Kenneth McCaleb, war editor of the New York Daily Mirror, admitted that whenever he had read about German atrocities, he had not taken them seriously because they had always come from “ ‘foreigners’ who, many of us felt, had some ax to grind and must be exaggerat[ing].”14
Given this prejudicial feeling about witnesses, one would have expected that visits by journalists themselves to the massacre sites would have dissipated these doubts. But when the barriers to belief were strong enough, even a face-to-face encounter with the remains of a Nazi atrocity did not suffice to dispel doubts, as an incident in the fall of 1943 demonstrated. In October 1943, as German forces were beginning to retreat from Russian territory, Soviet officials brought a group of foreign reporters to Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev in which the Nazis had killed thousands of Jews. The Russians told the reporters that the Germans had massacred between 50,000 and 80,000 Kiev Jews in September 1941 and the total number of Jews of Kiev who had been killed might climb to over 100,000.
By this point the Nazi threat to “exterminate” the Jews should have been understood as a literal one. There was little reason, in light of the abundance of evidence, to deny that multitudes were being murdered as part of a planned program of annihilation. But despite all the detail there was a feeling among some correspondents, New York Times reporter Bill Lawrence most prominent among them, that the reports that Hitler and his followers had conducted a systematic extermination campaign were untrue. Lawrence did not doubt that Hitler had “treated the Jews badly
, forcing many of them to flee to the sanctuaries of the West”; but even in October 1943—ten months after the Allied declaration confirming the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and six months after Bermuda—he could not believe that the Nazis had murdered “millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies. . . . and those who might be mentally retarded.”15
His skepticism permeated his story on Babi Yar. Though he acknowledged that there were no more Jews in Kiev, their whereabouts he simply dismissed as a “mystery.” Lawrence’s report surely left even the least skeptical reader unconvinced of the Babi Yar slayings.
On the basis of what we saw, it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity of the story told to us. It is the contention of the authorities in Kiev that the Germans, with characteristic thoroughness, not only burned the bodies and clothing, but also crumbled the bones, and shot and burned the bodies of all prisoners of war participating in the burning, except for a handful that escaped.16
Equally skeptical about the reports of mass murder was Jerome Davis of Hearst’s International News Service and the Toronto Star. Neither Lawrence nor Davis seemed able to accept the idea of a massacre, much less of a Final Solution.
Davis’s and Lawrence’s doubts would have been more understandable had their colleagues who visited the site with them manifested the same suspicions. But they drew markedly different conclusions. Bill Downs, who was Moscow correspondent for CBS and Newsweek, was convinced that one of the “most horrible tragedies in this Nazi era of atrocities occurred there.” Henry Shapiro of United Press, Maurice Hindus, a special correspondent for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and Paul Winterton of the BBC all described the flesh, human bones, hair, shoes, glass cases, and even gold bridgework they found in the dirt. Lawrence and Davis, who saw the same things the other reporters found, could not believe that they represented the remains of thousands. Though neither Lawrence nor Davis suggested it, it was obvious that they both believed that these items could have been placed in the sand by those who wished the reporters to believe that such things had happened there.17
Even meetings with eyewitnesses who had seen the action and participated in the burning of the bodies did little, if anything, to dispel Lawrence or Davis’s skepticism. In fact, they seem to have reinforced it. Lawrence described the witnesses as men “who said they were Soviet soldiers who had been captured by the Germans and forced to take part in the disinterment and burning.” Davis also described the men as “persons who say they were eyewitnesses.”18 In contrast, Shapiro described the same men as “three living witnesses of the German effort to exhume and burn every body in this charnel mass.” The fact that they were both Red Army lieutenants and “like most of the victims in Babi Yar—Jews” seemed to render them less credible witnesses for Lawrence and Davis but not for Downs, Shapiro, and Hindus.19 The Reuters Moscow correspondent also sent a straightforward report devoid of any skepticism in which he described how he had seen “the relics of giant funeral pyres in which the Germans . . . burned the remains of thousands of men, women, and children whom they had murdered.”20 In his report to the BBC Winterton relayed witnesses’ accounts of how the ground moved after the pit had been filled in because many of the victims were still alive when they were buried.21
Lawrence’s refusal to believe may explain why the New York Times, in contrast to a number of other papers, including the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Examiner, and New York Journal American, ran the story on page 3 and not on page 1.22 The New York Journal American not only ran Shapiro’s story on page 1 but gave it a banner headline:
100,000 KIEV CIVILIANS KILLED BY NAZIS
Wholesale Massacre Revealed23
Despite subsequent reports further confirming the disappearance of the Jews from cities and towns throughout Europe, Lawrence maintained his “built in skepticism” for a long time. If someone such as Lawrence, a seasoned reporter for the most important and influential American newspaper and one who had the chance to visit the site and talk with witnesses, remained so riddled with doubt, it is not surprising that the American public, which depended on the press to bring it the news, tenaciously clung to its skepticism. As we shall see, Lawrence was far from alone. In fact many of those in the highest and most powerful echelons of his profession maintained their skepticism for another year and a half.24
It was not until ten months later, in August 1944, that Lawrence was willing to accept the validity of the charges against the Germans. It was his visit to Maidanek, one of the first death camps to be reached by the Russian forces, which finally erased his skepticism. Lawrence’s report on this visit constituted more than just an extensive description of the camp and the horrors that took place there. It was also a mea culpa for what he now knew to be his unjustified doubts.
Never have I been confronted with such complete evidence clearly establishing every allegation made by those investigating German crimes. After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.25
Though Lawrence was at last willing to acknowledge that these stories were true, the New York Times apparently was convinced that many of its readers were not, and it took the unprecedented step of declaring its faith in one of its reporters. An editorial which appeared on the same day as Lawrence’s description of Maidanek assured readers that he was “employed by this newspaper because he is known to be a thorough and accurate correspondent” and that therefore they could believe what he wrote. Lawrence, who eventually became the New York Times White House correspondent, before joining ABC, wrote in his autobiography that never “before or since have I seen the Times so describe one of its reporters.”26
Other reporters who toured Maidanek with Lawrence had similar reactions. Associated Press staff member Daniel De Luce admitted that prior to the visit most of the other American and British correspondents in the group “could not even begin to imagine the proportions of its frightfulness.”27 Now they had no doubts.
Edgar Snow of the Saturday Evening Post, Richard Lauterbach of Time and Life, and Maurice Hindus of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York Herald Tribune all found the storehouse for the personal possessions of the victims more “terrifying” than even the gas chambers and the crematorium. In them they found rooms filled with shoes—one for men’s shoes and one for women’s—kitchenware, clothes, books, pocketknives, and other items that the unsuspecting victims had brought with them to facilitate their “relocation.”28 Maidanek “suddenly became real” to Lauterbach when he stood on top of a “sea” of 820,000 pairs of shoes which had cascaded out of a warehouse. After viewing the camp Newsweek’s Moscow correspondent described those killed upon arrival as “relatively lucky.”29 In the introduction to his detailed description of this camp, Snow explained why he broke with his magazine’s norm and wrote about a subject which was fully reported by the daily press. Maidanek was evidence of the way Nazi ideology enabled people to commit “crimes almost too monstrous for the human mind to accept.”30
But even now not everyone was convinced. In what could by this time be described as an almost reflexive action, The Christian Century rejected the news and attacked those who relayed it. It chided American newspapers for giving the story the “big headline of the day,” and claimed that the “parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale” of World War I was “too striking to be overlooked.” Neither the eyewitness journalist accounts nor the pictures of the gas chambers, the crematoria, the piles of bones and skeletons, the thousands of pairs of shoes, and the canisters of poison gas convinced this prominent journal that this report was not an atrocity story.31
Christian Century argued that its doubts were justified because the information came from the Russians, whom the journal did not trust. This lack of faith in the Russians had been exacerbated by Germany’s announcement in April 1943 that it had discovered a mass grave containing the bodies of over 10,000 Poles, mainly officers, near Katyn forest
, west of the Russian city of Smolensk. These officers, who had all been shot with their hands tied behind their backs, were believed to have been men who surrendered to the Russians in September 1939.32 Though the London based Polish government in exile charged the Russians with murder, most of the American press—with the exception of a few papers and journals including The Christian Century—dismissed the German claim as an attempt to divide the Allies and arouse anti-Russian sentiment.
Christian Century further justified its dismissal of the Maidanek story by claiming that it was designed to divert attention from the Russian refusal to aid the Warsaw uprising of August 1944. The Russians, anxious to ensure that a communist government would rule postwar Poland, had purposely stalled their advance into Warsaw until the Germans had executed hundreds of thou sands of Poles who had participated in the revolt. It was generally recognized in the west that the Russians wanted them killed because they believed that their loyalties were to the London based Polish government in exile and not to the Russian backed Polish Committee of National Liberation.33
Had the Russian released news of Maidanek been the only proof of German atrocities and had reporters not been brought to the site to inspect it and taken pictures of what they found, Christian Century’s doubts might have been more understandable. But given the human remains the reporters found at Maidanek and the preponderance of evidence which preceded it, much of which had not come from the Russians, such skepticism and derision of those who did believe seemed highly misplaced and possibly motivated by other sentiments.
Even this news of Maidanek and the eyewitness accounts by reputable American correspondents did not significantly change the way the American press treated this story: momentarily attention was paid, but all too quickly the news was forgotten. Though no other paper or journal was as skeptical as The Christian Century, few seemed inclined to abandon what had by now become an established pattern of relegating such news to positions of little importance. After a brief wave of interest, reports once again appeared in short articles on inner pages. But this pattern of deprecating the importance of the news regarding the Final Solution did not originate with the press. In fact the press was faithfully duplicating an Allied policy of obfuscation and camouflage.
Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 Page 29