the best camp of its kind in Germany, its inmates say. It was the rest camp of camps, with organized recreation. The worst camps were those at Auschwitz, in Silesia, and Lublin, Poland where many of Buchenwald’s residents had been at one time or another.60
In his famous broadcast Edward R. Murrow did the same. Based on what he learned from various inmates who had been in other camps, he described Buchenwald not as the worst, but as “the best concentration camp in Germany.” But Murrow and Kirkpatrick were exceptions. Most of their colleagues’ reports simply ignored the death camps. During this period, when the discussion of the concentration camps and German atrocities was frontpage news in many American papers, the death camps, particularly those established solely for murdering Jews, such as the ones at Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Belzec, were rarely mentioned. While some of them had been destroyed by the Germans, reports about them had reached the west. Maidanek, which had been visited by American reporters, was conspicuous by its absence from the news reports on the camps. Auschwitz, whose function and physical plan had been described in great detail by the War Refugee Board report, was often not mentioned.
It is true that reporters concentrate on and tend to believe what they and their colleagues can see, and no report of other places which were worse could compare with witnessing these graphic horrors first hand. Some reporters who had seen a number of different camps understood that there were gradations of horror. Henry J. Taylor, a special writer for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, worried that “much of the unspeakable horrors in some of them [the camps] may be doubted when the better treatment in the other camps becomes widely known.” By April 30 he had already been in eighteen different camps, including labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and “horror camps,” in which the “brutality . . . [was] beyond dispute.” Of these he found Bergen-Belsen “the largest and most terrible.” In most cases even for reporters, whose task it is to piece together what they see with other information in order to give readers a coherent picture of a larger issue, only seeing constituted believing. They witnessed the remains of what had happened at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Ohrdruf, and Buchenwald, and in their minds and reports these places came to epitomize Nazi atrocities. Moreover, what reporters saw in these camps was so terrible that it was difficult to imagine—even if one read about it in a government report or a colleague’s account—that anything could be worse. As Percy Knauth, who wrote the Time report on Buchenwald, observed, “this was the legend come to life before my eyes.”61
Had this tendency to describe such camps as Buchenwald and Dachau as the “worst” of the camps prevailed only during this period of liberation, it would be less noteworthy. But for many years following the end of the war it persisted. Raul Hilberg describes this pattern as a “functional blindness” which obliterates both the particular character of the German action against the Jews and the particular identity of the victims.62 The Final Solution and its victims, the Jews, lose their specific identity and become part of an all-encompassing program of Nazi persecution and the general mass of victims of this persecution. During the war this “blindness,” when practiced by the Allied governments and emulated by the press, functioned as a means of forestalling demands for specific action to rescue Jews.
Responsibility for the confusion about the Jewish identity of the victims lies not only with the Americans and the British but with the Russians as well; they also practiced a policy of ignoring the distinctive antisemitic nature of German persecution. At first the Russians were not that inclined to avoid mention of the Jews as victims. In January 1942 they released a detailed account of “monstrous villainies, atrocities and outrages committed by the German authorities in the invaded Soviet territories.” Jews were cited as one of a series of groups who had been persecuted, including Russians, Ukrainians, Letts, Armenians, and Uzbeks. In the report the victims at Babi Yar were described by Russian officials as “Ukrainians, Russians and Jews who showed their loyalty to the Soviet Government.” The Jews who were killed, according to the report, were “unarmed helpless . . . toilers.”63 The truth was that these Jews were not killed because of their loyalty to the Soviets or because the Germans had a specific policy of killing “toilers.” In this report—as in subsequent reports, in which the references to Jews were even more oblique—the Russians refrained from stating what they already knew to be true, namely that the Germans were methodically subjecting massive numbers of Jews to systematic executions because they were Jews.64
Even government observers in Washington, where a policy of not singling out Jews as victims was strongly adhered to throughout the war, were struck by the extent to which the Russians consciously ignored the Jewish aspect of the persecution.65When the representatives of the Soviet Atrocities Commission conducted the reporters through Maidanek, they described how on one day the Germans “annihilated 18,000 people—Poles, Jews, political prisoners and war prisoners.”66 Although many Soviet citizens who were not Jews had died in the course of the German advance, they had not been subjected to the systematic annihilation meted out to the Jews. It is not surprising that press coverage of this visit and other Russian news releases made it appear as if the Jews were simply one of the groups among the “thousands of civilians” who had been subjected to “abominable violence.”67
Henry Shapiro, UP’s correspondent in Moscow during this period, later described how the Russians progressively eliminated mention of Jews as victims. When he went to Babi Yar with other foreign correspondents in November 1943, there “was no question that this was a Jewish massacre and nothing else.” When reporters were taken to Maidanek, the Soviets “minimized” the role of the Jews. By the time Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, Shapiro recognized that the Russian authorities were intent on seeing to it that “the Jewish role—both as victim and as Soviet hero—was to be forgotten.”68
On occasion the Russians not only avoided mention of the Jews but actively censored reports that did mention them. Shortly after publication of his story on Maidanek, Bill Lawrence, the New York Times reporter in Moscow, received a cable from New York Times managing editor Edwin L. James, inquiring “why if most of the victims were Jewish, I had not said so.” This was, Lawrence noted in his biography, his “first realization that the Russians had eliminated this from my story.” When he confronted the Russian authorities and demanded to know why they had censored his story, he received what he described as a “rather lame and halting explanation . . . that some antisemites around the world might feel that if the victims were Jews, the murders were justified.” (Though Lawrence attacked the Russians for such a “lame” explanation, the American War Department, the Office of War Information, and the U. S. Army used a similar excuse in November 1944 in order to try to suppress information about Auschwitz—see below, pages 265-67.)69*
The Russians continued with their practice of not singling out Jews even after the camps were liberated. One of the earliest Pravda dispatches on Auschwitz, liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, described its inmates as “thousands of tortured people . . . . Russians, Poles, French, Yugoslavs and Czechs.”71The Soviet Foreign Minister described those who had died at Auschwitz as “citizens of various European countries.”72 When the Soviet news agency Tass released its special bulletin on Auschwitz on May 7, 1945, it condemned the “most horrible crime against the peoples of Europe” which had been committed there. The bulletin, which was based on the official report of the Extraordinary State Commission, said those peoples included “citizens of Russia, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and other countries.”73 Essentially this statement was correct. Of the approximately 4 million people killed at Auschwitz a minimum of 2 million were Jews.74 All of them were citizens of various European countries, but they were killed as Jews.
Both the Allies and the American press repeatedly depicted Jewish victims simply as nationals of countries. This helped cloud the public’s perceptions of the Nazi war against the Jews. The Final Solution wa
s in and of itself difficult to accept. The skeptical and ambiguous treatment of it by the Allies and the inability of the press to break with this pattern served to reinforce public confusion, doubt, and disinterest. Also, at the same time that the Allies were universalizing the Jews’ identity under the greater whole of all victims of persecution, the Nazis were singling Jews out for increasingly severe treatment.*
The News About Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account
The extent to which certain American officials were opposed to focusing on the murder of Jews was demonstrated in the fall of 1944 when John Pehle of the War Refugee Board received from American officials in Switzerland a full text of the eyewitness account of Auschwitz.76 The report contained precise details on the number and national origins of the victims, the process of moving newly arrived victims from the freight trains to the gas chambers, the kinds of work done by the inmates, the physical plant of the camp, the physical dimensions of the barracks, gas chambers, and crematorium, and the way in which the “selections” for the gas chambers were conducted. The escapees who were the eyewitnesses had also witnessed the preparation of the camp for the “handling” of Hungarian Jewry.77
When Pehle received the report—he had previously only seen a summary—he did two things. First, he urged John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, to “give serious consideration to the possibility of destroying the execution chambers and crematoria in Birkenau through direct bombing action.” McCloy rejected Pehle’s request with the incorrect but familiar explanation that it would pose too great a risk to American bombers and would divert critically needed air power.78 Pehle then decided to release the report to the press as a means of awakening public support for action.
Not since Kristallnacht had a story been so widely featured or prompted such extensive comment. Many papers carried it on the front page or in a prominent position elsewhere. The headlines alone encapsulated the press’s horrified reaction.
New York Herald Tribune:
U. S. CHARGES NAZIS TORTURED MILLIONS TO DEATH IN EUROPE
War Refugee Board Says 1,765,000 Jews Were
Killed by Gas in One Camp Alone; Witnesses’ Testimony
Gives Details of the Atrocities79
Louisville Courier Journal:
THE INSIDE STORY OF MASS MURDERING BY NAZIS
Escapees Give Detailed Accounts of the Gassing and
Cremating of 1,765,000 Jews at Birkenau
FROM AN OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE WAR REFUGEE BOARD80
Philadelphia Inquirer:
1,765,000 JEWS KILLED WITH GAS
AT GERMAN CAMP81
New York Times:
U.S. BOARD BARES ATROCITY DETAILS
TOLD BY WITNESSES AT POLISH CAMPS82
Washington Post:
TWO MILLION EXECUTED IN NAZI CAMPS
Gassing, Cremation Assembly-Line Methods Told by
War Refugee Board83
The Board appended a one-page preface attesting to its complete faith in the report’s reliability. It stressed that all the information—both dates and death tolls—tallied with the “trustworthy yet fragmentary reports” previously received and therefore the eyewitness statements could be considered “entirely credible.”84The New York Herald Tribune described the report as the “most shocking document ever issued by a United States government agency.” Virtually every news story on the report emphasized not only that this was an eyewitness report but that it had been released by the War Refugee Board, an official government body, composed of “the three highest ranking Cabinet officials.”85* This was, according to Ted Lewis of the Washington Times Herald, “the first American official stamp of truth to the myriad of eyewitness stories of the mass massacres in Poland.” The Louisville Courier Journal, which devoted an entire page to excerpts from the report, observed in its article that “there is no longer any need to speculate on the mass murdering of millions of civilians.” The amount of detailed informaion contained in the fifty-nine-page report made it difficult for anyone who had read it, one paper acknowledged, to dismiss it as “propaganda.” Joseph Myler, who wrote the UP dispatch, opened his account with a quote from the report itself: “Those remaining, about 3,000, were immediately gassed and burned in the usual manner.” This line, he noted, “varying but slightly, runs like a refrain” through the entire report.86 The release of this report and the response it engendered are a prime example of the symbiotic relationship between the government and the press. When an official government agency reacted forcefully, the press followed suit. As we have seen, most of the time this symbiosis worked in the opposite direction and produced a dramatically different result: the news was ignored.
One of the few papers to inject an explicit note of skepticism into its report was the Chicago Tribune, which prefaced its news story with the observation that there have been numerous reports on German atrocities, “some of which have been verified.” While previous reports had been accompanied by photographs, “no pictures were released to corroborate the atrocity story released today.” The extensive detail was still not enough for the Tribune, it wanted pictures. It never mentioned to readers that Auschwitz, the subject of the report, was still in German hands and consequently no pictures were available.87
The War Refugee Board’s release of this information should not be interpreted as a sign of a changing government policy. Two incidents demonstrate that Pehle was really acting on his own. Even after he sent the text of the full report on Auschwitz to the general press for release on November 26, 1944, some Administration officials tried to stop its publication. Pehle received a call from Office of War Information Director Elmer Davis, who was, according to Pehle, an “able journalist and a recognized liberal.” Davis, who was angry about the publicity, pressured Pehle “to call back the press release” because, he claimed, Americans would think it was propaganda.
The public would not believe that such things were happening and as a result would be inclined to question the government’s credibility on other information released concerning the war effort.88
But Pehle did not do so, and, contrary to Davis’s expectations, the information was not dismissed as propaganda. It was, in fact, the government’s imprimatur which made this story credible in the eyes of the press.
Equally as striking as Davis’s attempt to suppress this news was the successful attempt by high-ranking army officers to prevent it from reaching the armed forces. On October 30 Yank magazine, published by the armed forces for their members, contacted the War Refugee Board and asked if it “dealt in German atrocity stories.” A reporter for the magazine, Sgt. Richard Paul, had been assigned to prepare an article about German atrocities in order to “show our soldiers the nature of their enemy.” Paul arranged to meet with Pehle to gather information for the story. At their meeting Pehle gave Paul a copy of the report for use by Yank.
A few days later Paul informed the War Refugee Board that the report would appear in the next issue of the magazine. But Paul’s superiors intervened, told him that the story was “too Semitic,” and instructed him to get a “less Jewish story” from the Board. Pehle’s assistant at the War Refugee Board refused to give him one, and in her explanation she explicitly stated something neither the Allied governments nor the Allied press ever really made clear: most of the victims in the German death camps were Jews.*
Paul continued to try to win permission to publish his article, but he found that War Department and army officials had a “very negative attitude” toward what they described as a “hell of a hot story.” Paul’s superiors in the army and at Yank claimed that because of “latent antisemitism in the Army” they did not want to use the story. They argued, as did the Russians who had censored Lawrence’s story and Samuel Rosenman, who censored Roosevelt’s, that to speak of atrocities against Jews would serve to increase world antipathy toward the Jews. Paul lost his fight and Yank never published the story.89
This was not a unique incident at Yank. Generally when the magazine discussed atrocities,
it simply ignored those committed against Jews. On only a few occasions did it even mention Jews as among those killed. Its report on Lublin and Maidanek, for example, contained no reference to Jews. This may explain why as late as September 1944 there were army officers fighting in Europe who professed not to have heard anything about the concentration or death camps. What they did hear they dismissed as rumor.90
The release of the Auschwitz story erased many, though certainly not all, of the press’s doubts. As would become clear at the end of the war, many publishers, editors, and seasoned reporters managed to ignore or repress this news. Others continued to hope that somehow it was an exaggeration. Only a face-toface encounter with the evidence would convince them otherwise. At that point the struggle with this news would be transformed from one between belief and disbelief to one between knowledge and understanding.
Seeing and Trying to Believe
One of the most revealing aspects of the press reaction to the opening of the camps was the newspeople’s almost uniform admission that only now were they convinced that the atrocity reports had not been exaggerated. Almost all reporters, publishers, and editors acknowledged that they had not believed the news that had been dispatched over the past years and had come to Europe “in a suspicious frame of mind.” Their reaction sheds some light on the perplexing question of why they suppressed or ignored so much of this news. They had convinced themselves—in the face of much evidence to the contrary—that it was not true.
Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 Page 31