Beyond Belief (18 page)

In the opinion of the press America had done enough, and some even wondered if it had not done too much. Though this was a European matter, America had convened the conference, had promised full quota allocations, and and had already taken in more refugees than many other countries. An American, Myron C. Taylor, had served as the conference's president. America had come to France and England's aid just two decades earlier and now was being asked to do so again. A number of papers cautioned that it was not America's responsibility to “remake Europe.”
⁵⁵
The burden was on others to respond.

For the American press, the failure of Evian was the failure of the rest of the world to shoulder its share of the burden. Press reaction to the
Anschluss
, Evian, and, as shall be demonstrated in the pages that follow,
Kristallnacht
exemplified the way in which American contempt for German behavior coexisted with an unwavering commitment to isolationism and anti-immigrationism. Though the press was increasingly hostile to Nazi Germany, this did not preclude its strengthened commitment to the maintenance of American neutrality. Its sympathy for the victims and its contempt for the perpetrators did not negate its conviction that the gates of this land must remain firmly shut.

When on the night of November 9, 1938, the glass was shattered in Jewish homes, stores, and places of worship throughout the Reich, along with it were shattered American hopes about the possibility of achieving stability for Jews under Nazi rule. The Munich pact, concluded but six weeks earlier, now seemed to be a mockery of the notion “peace in our time.” Any expectation that Hitler and his government intended to abandon their policy of terror and physical persecution now seemed naive.

As a result of
Kristallnacht
the official and popular attitude toward Germany hardened. Roosevelt, genuinely repulsed by Nazi behavior, used
Kristallnacht
as a means of justifying his requests for increased defense allocations. The boycott of German goods regained its momentum, while those who had advocated a liberal attitude toward Germany or who had previously remained silent about events in that country condemned “this march backward into medieval terror.”
⁵⁶

For the first time since the Nazi accession to power a nationwide antisemitic action had taken place in full public view. In the past, even when the government's “hand” showed as the force behind similar violence, the violence had never occurred on such a national scale. Whereas the Germans had often dismissed foreign news reports as unreliable rumors based on “lies,” this time there was no denying. As Lionel Kochan has observed, “every newspaper correspondent in Germany and Austria could see and hear what was taking place, and through him his readers.” In reporting on
Kristallnacht
, the press transmitted to the American public firsthand, unimpeachable evidence of what it meant to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

The shock waves which reverberated through all segments of the public were so severe that Ambassador Dieckhoff described the reaction as a “hurricane . . . raging here” and urged Foreign Ministry officials to understand the change of attitude in America. He warned that many Americans who had previously “maintained a comparative reserve and had even, to some extent, expressed sympathy toward Germany, are now publicly adopting so violent and bitter an attitude.”
⁵⁷
NBC and CBS radio broadcast condemnations by former Governor of New York Al Smith, New York District Attorney Tom Dewey, former President Herbert Hoover,
former Presidential candidate Alf Landon, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and an array of other prominent religious, political, and educational leaders. Hoover's participation was particularly significant, because earlier in the year he had castigated the press for conducting what he felt was an anti-German campaign. Throughout the United States local, county, and state government officials expressed their horror. One southern governor wrote to Roosevelt that “it is time for America to stand four-square for humanity.”
⁵⁸

Nowhere was the criticism stronger and more sustained than in the press. In the weeks following
Kristallnacht
, close to 1,000 different editorials were published on the topic. Virtually every paper listed in the
Press Information Bulletin
, the White House's barometer of press opinion, carried a series of news stories and editorials on the issue. For over three weeks following the outbreak, eyewitness reports from Germany could be found on the front pages of numerous papers. Practically no American newspaper, irrespective of size, circulation, location, or political inclination failed to condemn Germany.
⁵⁹
Now even those that, prior to
Kristallnacht
, had been reluctant to admit that “violent persecution is a permanent fixture in Nazism” criticized Germany. During the early years of Nazi rule the most influential German-language newspaper in America, the
New Yorker Staatzeitung und Herald
, had defended Hitler's antisemitic measures. Its publisher and owner, Bernard Ridder, who also owned other American papers, returned from Germany in 1933 with the claim that when Hitler came into power he “found 62% of all governmental offices filled with Jews.” (The
Nation
hastened to deprecate Ridder's charge by pointing out that since Germany employed 970,000 salaried officials, this would mean that 601,400 of them were Jews, or “more than 40,000 [Jews] more than there were Jewish men, women, and children in the Reich.”)
⁶⁰
Subsequently the
Staatzeitung
was virtually silent about the persecution in Germany. Now even it joined in the chorus of condemnations. Its condemnation was news in itself and was cited by numerous papers as evidence of the fact that even German Americans who had long maintained an uncompromising loyalty to their homeland would not tolerate such outrageous acts.

But the press did not only condemn; once again it sought rational explanations for this apparently senseless course of events.
⁶¹
Some papers reverted to the “weakness, not strength”
theory that was common during the early years of Nazi rule.
⁶²
Various papers, including the
New York Daily News
, posited that
Kristallnacht
was an expression of anger and resentment on the part of those Germans who lacked funds and were under severe financial strain. The
New York Daily News
went so far as to conclude that Hitler “can no longer control his people, that he is losing his grip”; he had “turned so much German wealth into armaments that he can no longer provide for the rockbottom necessities of all his people.”
⁶³
This attempt to define
Kristallnacht
as an expression of popular anger turned the pogrom into a riot conducted by what the
Daily News
described as “hungry mobs” intent on plundering Jews. The paper's isolationist sentiments may have led it to this interpretation; if Nazi Germany was on the brink of collapse, there was no need for the United States to involve itself in this affair.

In sharp contrast, a significant portion of the press believed that it was strength, not weakness, which led to
Kristallnacht
. The Nazis had dealt with the world without penalty and felt that as concerned the Jews they could continue to do so. World leaders who had granted Hitler's every territorial wish certainly did not appear likely to penalize Germany for an attack on Jews. The
Wilmington
(Delaware)
News
dismissed those who would “read into [Kristallnacht] signs of Nazi weakness. The evidence points the other way.”
Newsweek
, concurring, noted that
Kristallnacht
came at a “moment of great international triumph and not as the refuge of a weak regime trying to foment hatred as a stimulant.”
⁶⁴
The most recent and possibly greatest German international success had come at Munich just six weeks earlier, and it was this, much of the press contended, that had given the Nazis the hubris to act in this manner.

According to much of the press, the timid and misguided policies of Neville Chamberlain had resulted in
Kristallnacht
. Because of the English “surrender” at Munich, various papers warned, Jews in Germany and German-dominated countries may have to be “rescued” or left “to suffer” Czechoslovakia's fate.
⁶⁵
The
Virginian Pilot's
observation that “peace in our times . . . seems certain only to insure an ever increasing measure of beastliness in our time” typified the reaction of numerous papers.
⁶⁶
There was a tendency, particularly on the part of isolationist papers, to use
Kristallnacht
as a means of clearly demarcating between American and British interests.
⁶⁷
Generally the isolationists condemned
Britain and advised the Administration to avoid all dealings with it, including dealings on matters relating to refugee resettlement.
⁶⁸

The
Gary
(Indiana)
Post Tribune
, in addition to declaring that
Kristallnacht
proved that appeasement was wrong, reminded readers, in what amounted to an almost gratuitous slap at Britain, that during World War I Americans had been “deceived by our Allies into believing a lot of atrocity tales.” The underlying message of the editorial was clear. Britain had deceived us once before and would do so again in order to entangle us in European affairs.
⁶⁹

The press's conviction that Munich had led to
Kristallnacht
resulted in part from its willingness now to view Nazi antisemitic actions as part of a broader context. This contrasted sharply with the way in which the press generally had treated Hitler's antisemitism as separate and distinct from his overall policies. This time the press linked Germany's domestic antisemitism to the conduct of its foreign policy. It did not argue that the two were different spheres with no connection, but recognized that the way the world treated Germany in the international arena could have a direct influence on how Germany behaved in the domestic arena. (Some papers had understood this at the time of the Olympics; many others had not.)

But while the press was able to link Germany's domestic and international policies, it still had difficulty grasping that one of the primary motives for
Kristallnacht
had been to destroy organized Jewish life and to make the Reich
Judenrein
. Instead the press, irrespective of its political outlook, interpreted
Kristallnacht
as a reflection of German financial exigencies; namely, this was said to be a way of extorting money from Jews.
⁷⁰
This view gained credence after the Nazi government announced that a fine was to be levied on the Jews. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
believed the “confiscation of Jewish wealth and property [to be] a revelation of the government's need of new funds” and the primary objective of
Kristallnacht
. Numerous papers dismissed the idea that the Nazis were motivated by racial hatred or the desire to transform Germany into an “Aryan” land. Greed had prompted them to act as they did: these were “pogroms for profit” designed to strip all “Jews in Germany of their wealth and savings.”
⁷¹
The
St. Louis Post Dispatch
described
Kristallnacht
as the “looting of a people,” while the
Baltimore Evening; Sun
termed it a “money collecting
enterprise.”
⁷²
The
New York Times
also adopted this view. In an editorial entitled “Profit from Persecution” it condemned Germany's plan to “make a profit for itself out of legalized loot.”
⁷³

The chance to acquire “easy loot” may well have motivated or encouraged some of the participants.
Kristallnacht
doubtlessly helped many German citizens and authorities to line their pockets. However, the potential cost to the economy as a result of loss of trade and destroyed property offset many of these “gains.” Had those who organized the pogroms been only or even mainly interested in fattening German coffers, they would have chosen a less costly way of doing so. The motivating factor was not financial gain, but deep and abiding antisemitism. Even at this stage, after five and a half years of Nazi rule, much of the press and even more of the public did not understand that antisemitism was a, if not
the
, keystone of Nazism and not a by-product of Nazi greed or a means of deflecting the German people's attention from other troubles.

There were some commentators who did understand, as an analysis of
Mein Kampf
which appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
a few months after
Kristallnacht
demonstrated. The author of the article argued that if Americans wanted to understand Hitler and the regime he led, they could not “blink the fact that hatred of the Jews is the mortar which binds together into one house all the bricks of Hitler's other hatreds.”
⁷⁴
Those reporters, editors, and readers who adhered to economic interpretations would fail to understand this.

Incidentally, the version of
Mein Kampf
which was sold in America did not contain many of the more virulent references to Jews. Senator Alan Cranston, who in the 1930s served in Italy and Germany as a reporter for International News Service, returned to America shortly after
Kristallnacht
. When he discovered that the sanitized American edition of
Mein Kampf
was “purged of its most vitriolic ravings,” he translated and published an unexpurgated version which was sold at cost. Before the American publisher sued him for violation of copyright—something the publisher, by Cranston's own admission, had every right to do—his edition sold over 500,000 copies.
⁷⁵