Beyond Belief (31 page)

the German people from overmuch brooding on the hardships imposed by an order holding guns preferable to butter. Except some scapegoat were offered they might have put the blame for low living standards where it belonged. Nazi propagandists nominated the Jew.

Because the blitzkrieg had bogged down as the German assault on Russia was stalled, the Nazis intensified the drive against their “helpless old scapegoat, the Jews.”
³⁷

American newspaper readers were told that Jews were being deported to the Ukraine to serve in work battalions and help with the harvesting of crops, that Jews in France, Belgium, and Holland were being deported because they had been “conscripted for work in Germany,” and that the deportations were taking place because “some Jews tried to escape into neighboring countries.” When 27,000 Jews in France were “rounded up” and sent to concentration camps at the end of July 1942, AP interpreted the move as a measure to increase “pressure on the French to supply the Nazi war industry with more skilled workers.”
³⁸
Even the
Manchester Guardian
, which had resolutely publicized the fate of European Jewry since the Nazi rise to power, fell prey to rationalizing. In late August 1942, two months after the release of the Polish government in exile report, the paper observed in an editorial that “the deportation of Jews to Poland means that Jews' muscles are needed for the German war effort.”
³⁹

That there was a tendency during the initial years of the war to explain the deportations in this fashion is understandable; it was logical to do so. As has been pointed out, it was difficult to comprehend that antisemitism was not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is harder to condone the continuation of this tendency to rationalize once word of the Final Solution was released. In August 1942 an article in the
Christian Science Monitor
on the deportations of Jews from France, Berlin, Finland, Slovakia,
and Croatia acknowledged that Jews were being killed. In fact it considered it impossible to “escape the conviction that the Nazis are endeavoring to exterminate the Jews of Europe in the shortest possible time.” The situation was more “desperate now than it had ever been.” But then the paper went on to explain
why
this was happening. Not only did the Germans need a “scapegoat to justify the increased demands that are being made on the German people,” but they wanted to isolate Jews from the invading Allied armies. The Germans feared that the Jews would be “a dangerous partisan threat” when the time came for the Allied attack and would rush to the Allies' aid.
⁴⁰
Similarly, the London-based
Economist
hypothesized that Himmler may have feared the “enormous influence which the ghettoes could exercise upon the whole Polish underground movement at a moment critical for the Germans,” and therefore decided to “apply more drastic measures. . . . [in the form of] the mass murder of tens of thousands.”
⁴¹
UP explained that the Germans had deported millions of Jews and others in order to rid “potentially troublesome areas [of] . . . potential leaders and paralyze further resistance,” to “weaken the help available to an Allied second front army,” and to “provide slave labor for Nazi war factories and for construction gangs on fortifications.”
⁴²
This kind of explanation turned the murdering of Jews into a tactical imperative.

Of course the press was not alone in its failure to accept what was truly underway. Government officials and a great portion of the American public shared its doubts. When reports of a plan to massacre Jews reached Allied hands, some British officials dismissed them as “sob stuff.” They argued that the reports of mass murder were exaggerated by Jews “who have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years.”
⁴³

As the months passed and the deportations continued, press reports did not question the fact that to be a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe was to live under the shadow of death. Typically, Paul Ghali, writing in the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, described the conflict raging in Switzerland over the policy of expelling Jewish refugees who had crossed the border illegally. To Ghali, as well as the other reporters stationed in neutral countries in Europe, it was obvious that “turning back these refugees . . . will probably mean their death”
because of the conditions they would face
. Similarly, in an editorial on August 29, the
New York Times
condemned the
deportation of 25,000 Jews from France. The paper described them as “serfs, destined to hard labor and the scantiest food and shelter after they have been deported to eastern Europe,” but the editorial made no mention of another fate they were destined to face: murder.
⁴⁴
There was no doubt that being a Jew meant living in conditions of disease, starvation, hard labor, all of which resulted in premature death. But what the press could not see or acknowledge was that Jews were now dying by the hundreds of thousands as the result of a policy more calculated and terrible in breadth and precision. And long after the Final Solution had been repeatedly confirmed and verified, explanations—sometimes of the most macabre sort—were being offered. Some of these explanations came from German sources, others from the Allies themselves. In February 1944 a number of papers reported the Dutch government's claim that Dutch Jews had been killed “so that more food will be available for Germans.” In July of that year the
New York Times
related suspicions among the Allies “that the wholesale killing of Jews is just another Nazi method of opening peace negotiations.”
⁴⁵

There were, of course, papers which understood the Nazis' motivations and were able to make the leap of imagination necessary in order to understand what was happening. In August 1942, when both the
Christian Science Monitor
and the
Economist
were offering tactical reasons to explain why the Nazis were killing Jews, a
London Times
editorial noted that while much of the uprooting of populations could be explained as German desire to denude “troublesome areas of most of their menfolk [and] . . . potential leaders” in order to “paralyze resistance,” this was not what was happening to the Jews. When 20,000 Jews were deported from France, “strategic considerations [could] scarcely be involved.” Those transfers had no military rationale but were proof of the “Nazi determination to purge western Europe of all its Jews.” Most important, the paper recognized something which much of the American press would never really grasp:

Hitler had always treated the complete segregation, if not extermination, of the Jews as the foundation of the “new order.”
⁴⁶

The treatment in the American press of the news of dire conditions facing European Jewry—the fact that the press did not ignore the reports of deportations and even death but devoted little
prominent space to them and often added disclaimers and qualifiers—reflected the chasm that existed between information and knowledge. It was a chasm that many editors and journalists would not be able to bridge until well after the Final Solution had reached its end.
⁴⁷

Two weeks before the end of 1942 the Allied governments themselves confirmed the existence of a program for the annihilation of European Jewry. Nonetheless, press treatment of it did not substantially change. There was a momentary flurry of interest which rapidly faded. Allied confirmation was preceded, in late November and December of 1942, by important revelations that, as usual, were often greeted guardedly by editors and generally confined to the inner recesses of most papers.

Late in November 1942 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, in his capacity as chairman of the World Jewish Congress, announced that 2 million Jews in occupied Europe had been slain in an “extermination campaign.” According to Wise, Hitler had ordered the murder of all Jews in Nazi-ruled Europe; the Jewish population of Warsaw had been reduced from a half million to 100,000; 80 percent of the Jews in Europe had been transferred to Poland, where they were destined for death, and the Nazis were using their corpses for “war vital commodities as soap fats and fertilizers.” Wise, anxious to allay any doubts about the reliability of his announcements, stressed that his sources had been “confirmed by the State Department.” In addition to State Department confirmation, Wise said that a representative of the President had returned from Europe to tell Wise that the “worst you have thought is true.”
*

The press's handling of Wise's announcement provides some important insights into its treatment of the news of the Final
Solution. Some of the major dailies—including the
Dallas News, Denver Post, Miami Herald, New York Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Examiner
, and
St. Louis Post Dispatch
—ran news of Wise's announcement on their front pages. Most, however, placed it on their inside pages. The
Los Angeles Times
carried it on page 2, the
San Francisco Examiner
on page 5, the
New York Journal American, New York World Telegram
, and
Baltimore Sun
on page 3, the
Chicago Tribune
on page 4, the
Washington Post
on page 6, the
Christian Science Monitor
on page 7, and the
New York Times
on page 10. The
Atlanta Constitution
put it on page 20 with the want ads and the train schedules, while the
Kansas City Star
and the
New Orleans Times Picayune
did not carry it at all. CBS, NBC, and Mutual radio broadcasts also ignored Wise's announcement.
⁴⁹

Despite Wise's contention that the State Department and the White House had authenticated his information, most major papers treated this as a story released by a Jewish source and an interested party. It was the “outcry of the victims themselves,” an
ex parte
statement and consequently less trustworthy than those that came from disinterested parties.
⁵⁰
Even the Jewish Agency, the official representative of the Palestinian Jewish community, considered non-Jewish eyewitnesses more credible than Jewish ones. In 1943 the Jewish Agency's Geneva office relayed to the State Department information it had received concerning the deportation and murder of the Jews from two people whom it pointedly described as “reliable eye-witnesses
(Aryans).”
⁵¹

The AP wire service report on Wise's announcement, which was used by most of the dailies, was skeptical about Wise's claims to have State Department confirmation. Wise was described as
“asserting
that he was authorized to disclose details by the State Department,” recounting “atrocities which he
claimed
had been confirmed,” and telling a story which was
“reportedly
confirmed” by the State Department. The headlines accompanying the article in most major dailies naturally adopted a similar approach. Wise was identified as the source, and the State Department's role was virtually ignored. The
Chicago Tribune:

2
Million Jews Slain by Nazis, Dr. Wise Avers

Washington Post:

2
Million Jews Slain, Rabbi Wise Asserts

New York Herald Tribune:

Wise Says Hitler Has Ordered 4,000,000 Jews Slain in 1942

Baltimore Sun:

Jewish Extermination Drive Laid to Hitler by Dr. Wise

New York Journal American:

Wise to Reveal Nazis' Program to Kill Jews

Los Angeles Examiner:

Two Million Jews Slain, Wise Says
⁵²

The
New York Times
was one of the few major papers whose headline not only referred to the State Department but treated Wise's assertions with a degree of certitude:

Wise Gets Confirmations

Checks with State Department On Nazis' “Extermination Campaign”

Though the
Times
headline mentioned the State Department, the story was run on page 10 as an addendum to an article on the murder of 250,000 Polish Jews—an article based on information released by the Polish government in exile in London. The New York daily
PM
, which had a distinctively liberal editorial policy and was in the forefront of the few papers and journals calling for an activist rescue policy, ran a headline and a series of stories which contrasted sharply with those of other papers. The cover of the paper, which related what news was to be found on the inner pages, carried the following headline in boldface print:

HITLER SPEEDS UP MURDER OF JEWS

Inside the headline read

HITLER ORDERS MURDER OF ALL EUROPE'S JEWS

On the following day
PM
carried stories based on State Department documents which Wise released to the press:

This is Fascism: How Nazis

Slaughtered 24,000 Jews in Latvia
⁵³

Throughout this period
PM
publicized this news directly and forcefully. Its handling of these reports contrasted markedly with that of most other dailies.

The State Department, in a series of off-the-record conversations with press representatives, had distanced itself from Wise. In response to queries as to whether it had confirmed the information, all that J. McDermot, chief of the State Department's Division of Current Information, would say was that Rabbi Wise had visited the Department “in connection with certain material in which he was interested” and he was given this material. Even this was told to the press “in confidence and not for publication.” According to McDermot, the only thing the Department had done was “facilitate the efforts of [Wise's] Committee in getting at the truth.” He would neither confirm information nor answer any questions on the matter. Instead correspondents were directed to pose “all questions concerning this material to Rabbi Wise.”
⁵⁴
R. Borden Reams, who was in charge of Jewish affairs for the European Division of the State Department, pressured Wise, though unsuccessfully, to “avoid any implications” that the State Department was the source of “documentary proof of these stories.”
⁵⁵
It is not surprising, therefore, that the AP dispatch and the various headlines reflected some ambiguity.