Universalizing the Victims
Part of the responsibility for both American skepticism and the press’s ambiguous treatment of this news can be traced directly to Allied opposition to publicizing reports of atrocities against Jewish victims. On many occasions when atrocities against Jews were discussed, the identity of the victims was universalized. In other words, Jews became Poles or Russians or innocent civilians.34 American and British leaders had been intent on avoiding mention of Jews as the specific victims of Nazi hostility as early as 1938 at Evian, and their policy had not substantially changed since. The Allies argued that if they treated Jews as a separate entity, it would validate Nazi ideology. A truer explanation for this behavior was American and British fear that singling out the unique fate of the Jews would strengthen the demands of those who wanted the Allies to undertake specific rescue action on their behalf. The Americans worried that they might be asked to admit more Jewish refugees, and the British were concerned that pressure would be put upon them to open Palestine to Jews.
It therefore became Allied policy to refer to “political refugees” and not Jews, even when these refugees were clearly Jews. Rarely did any reporters or editorial board take note of this policy. One notable exception was PM’s Alexander Uhl, who angrily wrote during Bermuda that delegates were so anxious to avoid linking the rescue problem with Jews that it had been regarded as “almost improper to mention the word Jew’ ” at Bermuda despite the fact that there were, according to Uhl, “at least 2,000,000 whose very existence is threatened.”35
Probably the most outrageous example of this explicit policy of ignoring the Jewish aspect of the tragedy occurred in Moscow in the fall of 1943. There Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met and affixed their signature to what is known as the Moscow Declaration, which warned that
Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland or in the territories of the Soviet Union . . . will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.
Nowhere in the declaration were Jews even obliquely mentioned, a phenomenon the press simply ignored. While there were some exceptions to this Allied policy, e.g., the December 1942 statement confirming the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews, they were few. When declarations did contain references to Jews, as was the case in March 1944 when Roosevelt referred to the Hungarian situation, the President’s advisers vigorously worked to ensure that they were not too prominently mentioned.36
This policy began to change somewhat when John Pehle and the War Refugee Board pushed for a different approach. But only quite late in the war did the Office of War Information officially take the “lead in getting out, and on official records, every pertinent fact regarding murder and mistreatment practiced by the Nazis.” Prior to that it had avoided too frequent mention of atrocities, particularly those against Jews. The War Information Guide, a handbook prepared and distributed by the Office of War Information for government personnel and for “those outside groups which are cooperating with the government in giving the American people the full facts of war,” instructed that atrocity stories were to be used to illustrate the enemy’s “planned strategy and principles,” and not just to incite hatred. Government officials determined that all information on atrocities which bore upon the “rulers and ruling parties in the countries with which we are at war should be publicized.” Reports that simply inspired Americans to hate “all members of the races guilty of such action (i.e. Japanese)” were to be avoided.
There was, however, an even more stringent policy in operation regarding atrocities against Jews. The Office of War Information, working in tandem with the Administration, tried to severely limit any public attention paid to this story. Despite the fact that the Final Solution was the prime illustration of the enemy’s “strategy and principles,” the Office of War Information wanted it to be avoided by news agencies and not mentioned in war propaganda. Deputy Director of the Office of War Information Arthur Sweetser sent a memorandum to Leo Rosten, who was Deputy Director in charge of information on the enemy, on the “impending Nazi extermination of the Jews.” In it he argued that the story of atrocities would be “confused and misleading if it appears to be simply affecting the Jewish people,” and therefore news of the particular fate of the Jews should be contained and even suppressed. Consequently, when the news of German atrocities was publicized, the Jewish aspect was often eliminated.37
The press mirrored the official policy of omitting mention of Jews or incorporating them into the general suffering faced by many other national groups. Such was the case in 1943 when Charles E. Gratke, foreign editor of the Christian Science Monitor, who had served as the paper’s Berlin correspondent in the 1930s, analyzed the first decade of Nazi rule. Here is Gratke on Nazi racial hatred:
No one in 1933, hearing the vitriolic denunciations of the Poles, could escape the meaning of the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. In the days when Hitler came to power, few Nazi insults were more potent than to call a man a “Pole.” . . . And today, under the Gestapo heel, an entire race is being systematically decimated . . . . Millions—literally—of Polish men and women have paid in final anguish for the disbelief of the world.
Gratke had been in Germany during the Nazi takeover. He had heard bitter denunciations of the Jews and had witnessed the first steps in their disenfranchisement. His paper had reported various aspects of the Final Solution, albeit in a confused and ambiguous fashion. Moreover, his article appeared after the Allies had confirmed the existence of a plan to annihilate the Jews. Nonetheless, in his article no “Jew” was to be found in his discussion of either “racial superiority” or acts of persecution.38*
The Christian Science Monitor was, of course, not alone in this curious behavior. Another striking omission was evident in the January 1943 Los Angeles Times review of the preceding ten years, which it termed the “Black Decade.” The review was largely based on information compiled by the Office of War Information. Although the April 1 boycott against German Jews was mentioned as one of the outstanding events of 1933, Kristallnacht was not referred to, nor was the news of the extermination program included in the listing for 1942, when the Allies had jointly confirmed the existence of a program to annihilate the Jewish people. The massacre of 2,000 Czechs and the destruction of Lidice and Levszaky in the aftermath of Heydrich’s murder were included in the list of events.40
Even when war had virtually ended and the camps were being liberated, reporters continued to incorporate the fate of the Jews into that of all other national groups that had been incarcerated and murdered at the camps.41 For example, Edgar Snow wrote that at Maidanek “Jews, Germans and other Europeans were all robbed in common and were all fed to the same ovens.”42 Other reports described the victims as “men, women and children of 22 nationalities”—some citing Jews as constituting “half” or “most” of the victims, others simply listing them along with Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Belgians, Germans, and Dutchmen. Time correspondent Sidney Olsen, who accompanied the U.S. Seventh Army as it liberated Dachau, described its inmates as “Russians, French, Yugoslavs, Italians, and Poles.” In this camp, Olsen observed, were “the men of all nations whom Hitler’s agents had picked out as prime opponents of Nazism; here were the very earliest of Nazi-haters. Here were German social democrats, Spanish survivors of the Spanish Civil War.” But nowhere in his article was there a Jew.43*
This reaction was not simply indicative of reporters’ failure to know the specific identity of the inmates or victims of a particular camp. It was indicative of something far more significant. Throughout the war the press had tended to ignore or minimize the specific fate of the Jews, and even now that correspondents were witnessing the grim results of the Final Solution, they could not grasp what they were seeing. None of the reporte
rs who toured Maidanek—even those who mentioned Jews as among the victims—associated what they saw there with the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jewish people. It was as if they recognized that a battle against innocent civilians had occurred but did not understand what war it was part of. This failure to understand that Maidanek or any one of numerous other places reached by the Allies in the last months of the war was part of this particular larger picture, the plan of annihilation, is a reflection of the dissonant way the press treated the persecution of the Jews. Because most journalists had ignored and minimized the reports of atrocities against the Jews, when they saw the final outcome they found it difficult to admit to themselves—and to their readers—what they were witnessing.
Press inability to understand the all-encompassing nature of the event that Maidanek and other places like it represented would become painfully apparent in the final moments of the war when a group of America’s most influential publishers and editors visited German concentration camps. On April 12, 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower visited one of the first concentration camps to be liberated by the Allies. In a letter to his wife Mamie, Eisenhower wrote that he “deliberately” visited the camp in order to be able to give “first hand evidence . . . if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”45 He also decided that influential Americans who helped shape public opinion must do the same as a further way of forestalling any assertion that the story of Nazi brutality was just propaganda. At his suggestion Washington invited a group of American publishers and editors to see the German concentration camps which had been liberated by American forces. The group, which was selected by the War Department, included, among others, publishers and editors of the New York Times, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Reader’s Digest, Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, the Hearst papers, and the Scripps-Howard papers. The reports by these editors and publishers, who visited Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau, as well as the reports by correspondents accompanying the Allied forces in the weeks before V-E Day, were widely featured in the press. Many were conspicuously placed on the front page.46
Now that these top members of the press corps were face to face with the victims, their doubts about the atrocity reports disappeared. But even now they were unable to grasp what the Final Solution had been. They did not seem to understand that the fate of the Jews had been unique in both ideology and scope. Their failure to comprehend the Jewish aspect of this entire tragedy was reflected in their description of the victims and explanation of why they were in the camps. Joseph Pulitzer, in an address to the Missouri Legislature upon his return, described the camps as full of “political prisoners” including “Jews, Poles, and Russians.”47 Malcolm Bingay, editor of the Detroit Free Press, explained that the prisoners he saw at camps were there because
they refused to accept the political philosophy of the Nazi party. . .. First Jews and anti-Nazi Germans, then other brave souls who refused to conform.48
These editors and publishers described the people they found in the camps as “prisoners whose only crime was that they disagreed or were suspected of disagreeing with the Nazi philosophy.”49 When twelve members of Congress returned from a visit to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Nordhausen at about the same time, they did the same and described the victims of the Nazis as those “who refused to accept the principles of Nazism or who opposed the saddling of the Nazi yoke on their countries.”50
Jews were not in the camps for any of these reasons, and the press did not seem to understand that even now. While no one denied that Jews were mistreated and often were the most cruelly mistreated, journalists still seemed reluctant to admit that much of what they were seeing was part of a program to systematically wipe out an entire people. They had been unable to link Maidanek, Babi Yar, or the fact that in every place reached by the Allies the Jews were gone with the plan to destroy the Jewish people. So too they did not associate what they were now seeing in these camps, where most of the survivors were Jews, with the Final Solution. Once again the fate of the Jews was intermingled with that of the other victims. The way in which the issue was dealt with was typified by an official army report on Buchenwald which noted that all prisoners were treated brutally and “Jews were given even worse treatment than the others.” It was the same theme that had been apparent in so many of the previous press reports: everyone suffered and the Jews probably a bit more than everyone else.
These visiting publishers, editors, and reporters seemed almost eager to impress on the American public that Jews had not been the only ones to be killed. The persistence of this theme in their reports raises the question of whether they believed or had been convinced by government and military officials that the public would be less aroused if it thought that only Jews had been mistreated. Jack Bell, war correspondent for the Miami Herald, acknowledged that Jews had been killed but hastened to point out that they were but one group among many.
The murder of Jews was automatic, yes, but it was not only they who were tortured. Germans who opposed the Nazis, slaves from every nation in Europe, children and women, as well as men—all came, were beaten and worked until they could go on no longer—then they died of wounds, or starvation and their bodies were carted to crematories.51
The editors’ report, issued in Paris on May 5, did the same. It described what happened in the camps and noted that “after the Jews, the most cruelly treated victims were the Russians and the Poles.52 According to the Congressional delegation, Jews, Russians, and Poles were “treated with a greater degree of severity than other nationalities.” Neither the editors nor the members of Congress were able to admit that though multitudes had been cruelly tortured and murdered, Jews alone had been singled out for total national annihilation.53 This was something that should have been clear to them given their access to the news and the dispatches. But because they had ignored and avoided this story during the preceding years, they did not seem able to make the leap of imagination necessary in order to understand.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch took issue with the Congressional delegation for describing the victims as “intellectuals, political leaders and all others who would not embrace and support the Nazi philosophy and program.” It pointed out that they were not the only ones to feel the Nazi wrath. Also destined for extermination were those “whose only offense was living.” But then the paper went on to explain why the latter were killed:
The purpose was not only to suppress opposition but also to slaughter conquered peoples so as to weaken their military potential.54
This may have correctly explained why the Nazis killed many of their victims. However, in the case of the Jews, the German rationale was entirely different. Jews were not killed in order to suppress opposition or weaken the military potential of the enemy. In fact Jews were killed even when this weakened the Germans’ military potential or deflected the full capacity of their might from the war effort. The press may not yet have known about the slave factories which were closed down when the Jews who worked in them producing critically needed munitions, uniforms, and other war matériel were dispatched to their death. But it did know about the millions who had been killed in various death camps and should have been able to recognize the drain such a program imposed on the war effort.
When the camps were opened in the spring of 1945, the chaos of war and postwar confusion reigned supreme, making it extremely difficult to ascertain precise numbers and know what was being found in other places. But enough information had previously emerged to enable Allied journalists, had they been inclined, to see the larger picture. The Hearst papers were among the few that were willing to explicitly acknowledge that “the Jews of Europe have been the principal victims of this bestiality.”55 There were some reporters who understood that the philosophy which led to the destruction of the Jews was inherently different from that which resulted in the destruction of so many others.56 For example, Paul Ghali, correspondent of the Chicago Daily News-Post Dispatch News Service, recognized tha
t Germany had won its war against the Jews.
At least one point in Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” program has been carried out thoroughly—the bestial extermination of European Jews. Of the total of eight million Jews living in Germany and German occupied countries before the war, 6,200,000 have died from either execution, cruel treatment or starvation.57
But such observations were exceptions to the rule. In most cases the particular fate of the Jews was incorporated into that of all of Europe’s peoples.
Another example of confusion or myopia was the persistent appearance during the spring of 1945 of press reports describing the concentration camps, as opposed to the death camps such as Maidanek and Auschwitz, as sites where the worst atrocities were committed.* Gene Currivan of the New York Times described Buchenwald as “second only to . . . Dachau, near Munich, as the world’s worst atrocity center.”58 Judy Barden, staff correspondent of the New York Sun, described Dachau as “evidence of the most horribly gruesome tortures yet to come to light from any German prison camp.” Associated Press reporter Howard Cowan called Dachau the “most dreaded extermination camp.”59 As terrible as these places may have been, the death camps in the east were far worse. Though these reporters had not been there, enough detailed information had been given to the press to demonstrate the differences between the two kinds of camps. The War Refugee Board’s detailed report on Auschwitz had been released in November 1944. A large group of journalists had visited Maidanek in August 1944. Their descriptions and photographs of the place had appeared in numerous papers and magazines. The camps visited in spring 1945 by war correspondents and publishers—e.g., Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald—contained prisoners who had been transferred during the final stages of the war from Auschwitz and other death camps to camps in Germany. These prisoners were able to disabuse reporters of the notion that these were “the worst camps.” And in certain cases they did. Helen Kirkpatrick, of the Chicago Daily News-Post Dispatch News Service, described Buchenwald not as one of the worst camps, but as
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