Beyond Belief (8 page)

Over the course of the years to 1945 the details would multiply,
but the doubts would never be completely erased. By early in the Nazis' rule a pattern had emerged which would characterize the reaction of the press as well as the public to the entire Nazi persecution. Americans did not doubt that things were difficult for the Jews but seemed reluctant to believe that they were as bad as reporters on the scene claimed. Whether the story was of Jewish judges being dragged from their courtrooms or Jews being rounded up and shot en masse, the news was greeted with both horror and disbelief, condemnation and skepticism.

2

As reports of the beatings and legal disenfranchisement of the Jews continued to flow out of Germany, it became increasingly clear that physical and juridical antisemitism had found a secure niche in Nazi Germany. Now that persecution was occurring with frightening regularity, the press sought to explain why it was happening. The events being reported sounded so fantastic that condemnation alone seemed insufficient. The determination to discover “what is behind it” and “what's it all about” was also characteristic of the press response to Nazi antisemitism. Ironically, the more it sought to explicate, the more it tended to obscure reality.

Analysis of the explanations offered is illuminating because it is in them, more than in the condemnations, that the press's perception of what was happening to Jews in Nazi Germany can best be discerned. In a certain respect these explanations shaped the way in which both contemporary analysts and future scholars would understand German behavior. Had the American press and other Western observers understood the central role of antisemitism
in Nazi ideology, they would have been less perplexed by the violence, which seemed to run counter to Germany's intention to win investing nations' confidence in the Reich. During this period it was common knowledge that Germany wanted “above all things to make a favorable impression on the outside world”; why then, the press wondered, did it allow antisemitic outbreaks to mar its image?
¹

The press's confusion was heightened in the summer of 1935 when the quiet of Berlin's fashionable Kurfürstendamm was shattered as groups of rowdy and destructive Germans—exactly who they were and who instigated their actions remained a matter of contention in the press—stormed up and down the boulevard. They brutally beat up Jews, and all those they assumed were Jews, who were frequenting the famed ice cream parlors and outdoor cafes on the tree-lined avenue or promenading in the cool summer evening breeze. The riots lasted through the evening and were repeated a number of times in the following days.

Witnessed by summer strollers, foreign correspondents stationed in Berlin, and tourists from various nations, the outbreaks were prominently featured on the front pages and in the editorial columns of the American press, even though they were not the most violent actions to occur since the onset of Nazi rule. World interest was heightened by the fact that unlike earlier violence, these riots took place not in a small town, village, or provincial city, but in the German capital, the seat of the German government. These disruptions could not, therefore, be dismissed as local aberrations or blamed on the excesses of overly zealous provincial storm troop leaders. Observers were particularly perplexed by these events because they occurred during the American debate over participation in the Olympic Games and while the British Minister of Trade was in Berlin negotiating with the Germans. Western commentators assumed that Germany would bar anything that might jeopardize the Games' success. A strong foreign reaction to these riots could increase the likelihood of a boycott.

Because they appeared to contravene German objectives, the press was all the more motivated to find a rationale for them.
The explanations offered in various editorials for these and other similar incidents fell into a few basic categories. The most commonly accepted motive was that Hitler wished to “divert attention” from domestic problems and to camouflage the steadily worsening economic situation. One editorial argued that by focusing attention on the Jews, the German government could “flimflam on matters of vital concern.”
²
“Frenzy . . . [and] hysteria are vented upon minorities,” one paper concluded, to “keep public attention away from the [economic] crisis.”
³

The riots, as well as the many other antisemitic provocations, were also seen as an attempt to unify the German people. The Jews “have always made excellent ‘whipping boys' . . . and [have] provid[ed] an outlet for a resentment” which otherwise, for “lack of a scapegoat,” might be directed at the government. The
Dallas News
believed Hitler was “bolstering his position by playing to anti-Jewish sentiment.”
⁴
Similar explanations would be offered by the American press eight years later to explain the deportations of Jews from Germany.

German antisemitism was also commonly interpreted as a reflection of the country's dissatisfaction with the Versailles treaty. The
Houston Post
argued in April 1933 that while “a dictatorship for Germany is regrettable, it was inevitable” because of the peace pact. Though various papers and commentators subscribed to this position, it was argued most persistently by the leading isolationist paper, the
Chicago Tribune
. If the inequities from Versailles could be rectified, then, the paper contended, Hitler's diatribes and the internal violence they provoked would be eradicated. The
Cincinnati Enquirer
echoed this view. These rationalizations and explanations gave Nazi behavior an aura of inevitability. Blaming the persecution on Versailles or on the German balance of payments relieved the Nazis of responsibility, making it appear that they were simply being carried along by events beyond their control. Second, such explanations placed ultimate responsibility for the violence on those who had imposed the treaty on Germany.
⁵

But external forces were not all that was blamed; the victims were blamed as well. One common interpretation offered during this period, and still heard many years later, was that the Jews had brought this on themselves. The
Christian Science Monitor
was among those who found Jews, both inside and outside of Germany, responsible—at least in part—for the Reich's brutality. It suggested that the reports of violence were “exaggerated” by those
“inclined towards hysteria,” including reporters and Jews in America and England. In its editorials and commentaries on the April 1, 1933, German boycott of Jewish stores and businesses, the
Christian Science Monitor
argued that Jewish, not German, excesses needed curbing. The
Monitor's
front-page columnist, Rufus Steele, placed the responsibility for the German boycott on foreign Jews' calls for a boycott of German goods: this forced the Nazis' hand and prompted retaliation in the form of the April 1 action, which was a “rebuke to false propaganda about atrocities.” Once again Germans were depicted as responding to a situation that was neither their fault nor their responsibility. The same approach to the boycott was adopted by the
New York Herald Tribune
and its Berlin correspondent John Elliott. They were convinced that Jewish protests were inflaming the situation. On a number of occasions in March 1933 Elliot argued that Jews were not being persecuted because of their “race,” but because they were “political” opponents of Hitler. Einstein, he contended, was “detested by the Nazis more for his pacifism than for his Jewish blood.” On March 27 the paper carried two front-page stories on the Jews' situation. One reported Hull's assurances that the violence had ended, and the other discussed how American Jews were determined to protest conditions in Germany “despite assurances” from Hull and representatives of German Jewry that there was no violence. The impression left by both stories was that American Jews were exacerbating a difficult situation which, according to United States government officials, had been ameliorated. According to the
New York Herald Tribune
German Jews had “beg[ged]” American Jews to end their protests but the latter had adamantly “refuse[d].” The
New York Herald Tribune
presented the curtailing of the boycott as dependent on “Jews” ceasing to spread “atrocity tales.” The
Literary Digest
was noncommittal as to who was most to blame and faulted both Germans and “Jewish sympathizers abroad” for the “double edged sword” of boycotts.

Round and round in a dizzying circle of atrocity reports, denials of atrocities, protests, counter-protests, apprehension, boycotts and counter-boycotts, revolve Chancellor Hitler of Germany, his Nazis, German Jewry and Jewish sympathizers abroad.
⁶

The most vituperative attack on Jews' protests appeared three days after the April 1 boycott in the lead editorial in the
Christian Science Monitor
. It accused American Jews of exacerbating the situation
by demanding that official bodies such as the State Department and the League of Nations condemn Germany. German people, the editorial argued, had the right not only to be indignant over “atrocity” stories but to punish “rumor mongers.” The
Christian Science Monitor
not only placed the word “atrocity” in quotation marks, thereby indicating its doubts about the accuracy of the reports, but reiterated almost verbatim the Nazi explanation for the boycott: “Stringent measures against those who spread lies against Germany are easily justified.” In contrast to the
Monitor's
justification of the boycott, the
New York Times
believed the boycott proved that the Nazis were “acting blindly and almost . . . with a touch of insanity.”
⁷

Relying on Biblical imagery, the
Christian Science Monitor
accused Jews in America and England of practicing the “ancient code of an ‘eye for an eye.'” Had Jews heeded Jesus' commandment to “love one another” and Spinoza's saying that “it is rational to repay persecution with love,” this “misunderstanding” might have been avoided. Who misunderstood whom was not clarified.

Among the most telling aspects of the editorial was a brief statement that illuminated the
Christian Science Monitor's
general attitude toward Jews. It exonerated the non-Jewish world of responsibility for its antisemitism by declaring that it was Jews' “commercial clannishness which . . . gets them into trouble,” and recommended that Jews both “within Germany and without might give some attention to this problem.”
⁸
The entire editorial reflected the tradition of the modern Protestant critique of Judaism, whose source was in a school of scholarship which portrayed Judaism as a soulless religion of dry legalisms and national particularism.
⁹
The paper revealed a latent hostility toward Jews and Judaism by raising the specter of
lex talionis
, accusing Jews of failing to adhere to Jesus' commandment and attributing Jews' sorrows to their supposed economic propensities and to protests by American and English Jews. The editorial indicated that the
Christian Science Monitor's
view of the Jews' contemporary suffering was refracted through the prism of Christianity's long-standing theological view of Judaism.