Beyond Belief (27 page)

Although by the fall of 1941 news of the slaying of Jews had begun to appear, the press generally focused far more attention on Jewish life in Germany and German-occupied Western Europe, very naturally concentrating on what it could see—and in the fall of 1941 it could see quite a bit. In early September, after what the embassy in Berlin described as an “absence of some months,” the Jewish question was “put very prominently back in the public eye” by the Gestapo decree requiring all Jews in Germany and Bohemia and Moravia above the age of six to wear a yellow star. By the end of the month the embassy and the press were correctly predicting that “more radical measures to segregate Jews in Germany” were in the offing.
³⁵

During the months of October and November the news reported was consistently distressing. Throughout the Reich and Western Europe Jews were being arrested, ordered to wear identifying tags, denied their possessions, forced to work at the most menial jobs, and evicted from their homes.
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The most ominous news came in mid-October with the beginning of what United Press described as the “severest anti-Jewish drive in three years.” According to Fred Oeschner, UP bureau chief in Berlin, the first wave of deportations had been somewhat “makeshift,” but “there was nothing halfhearted” about this second wave. From various cities in Western Europe as well as the Reich—including Berlin, where many reporters were stationed—came reports that thousands of Jews “were being dispatched on short notice to ghettos in Poland.” According to United Press, 1,000 or more Jews were being moved every night from Berlin to Poland for incarceration in ghettos and camps. Various reporters, including two from
United Press, witnessed how Jews were loaded on trains which then moved eastward. AP reported that a ghetto had been established in Lvov and that 450 Jews had died in Mauthausen, the camp in Austria. Whereas many people in Germany had not yet heard about the mass killings on the Russian front, there was virtually no one in Berlin who, according to Oeschner, “did not have some idea of what was going on.” There was no doubt that foreign correspondents and diplomats stationed in the major cities in Europe knew that Jews by the thousands were being deported.
³⁷
Unlike the massacres, which were “purported” and undocumented, these other incidents were witnessed by American reporters stationed in German-occupied Europe. The
Chicago Tribune
condemned the deportations as a “new savagery.”
³⁸

Through the fall of 1941, reports from various parts of the Reich described the desperate situation. In the wake of the decree that all Jews had to wear a yellow star, a Stockholm paper reported that 200 Jews had committed suicide. Louis Lochner reported that there was “a new wave of antisemitism” in Berlin. Jews had been barred from grocers' lists and could not buy vegetables, fruit, sweets, canned milk, and many other products. Synagogues were being closed, and all Jewish households due to be evacuated had been ordered to fill out an inventory of all their possessions.
³⁹
The Jews of Hanover were reported to be living in “cemeteries on the outskirts of the city” because their homes had been requisitioned. Everywhere Jews were described as being “hungry and without adequate shelter.” The
Chicago Tribune
termed the regulations placed on the remnants of Berlin Jewry a “tribute to the diabolical ingenuity of the Hitler gang.”
⁴⁰
United Press, relying on what it described as “usually reliable sources,” claimed that “a sentence to a concentration camp was the standard punishment” for violation of the decree that Jews must wear a yellow star. Children's laxity was punished by incarceration of the parents.
⁴¹
A Free Press News Service correspondent in Bern, Frank Brutto, in a lengthy survey of the conditions facing Jews in Europe, reported that 4,000 Yugoslavian Jews had been left without food and water on an island off the Dalmatian coast. Within a week, Brutto reported, 1,000 were dead.
⁴²

The press did not have to depend on reliable but unnamed sources; it could look directly to the Nazis for information. This had been the case before the war began and continued thereafter. With the exception of the details regarding the death camps and
mobile killing units, much of the information reported by the press came from Nazis spokesmen and newspapers. In October 1939 a Nazi “authorized source” had told the press that Hitler was contemplating a “Jewish reservation” in Poland. In March 1940 the
New York Times
described the manner in which 80,000 Jews in Cracow were “gradually being pushed back to the ghetto, . . . cut off from practically all connections with . . . the [outside] world . . . thrown entirely on their own resources.” At the end of the article, which painted a dismal picture of life under these conditions, the reporter stated that “this is the picture furnished by the official Government General organ” and then, as a means of insinuating that things might even be worse, noted that direct contact was forbidden and therefore the “full scope” was unknown. In August 1940 Associated Press reported that according to
Schwarze Korps
, the official “mouthpiece of Hitler's Elite Guard,” a Jew-free Europe was the Nazi aim.
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In the fall of 1941 German newspapers kept the public informed of at least some of the deportations. The Cologne newspaper
Kölnische Zeitung
reported that all the Jews in Luxembourg had been transported eastward.
⁴⁴

But officially the Nazis still denied that anything akin to mass murder was underway. Some papers used statistics released by German sources to shed doubt on the Nazi denials of persecution. In April 1940 the
Buffalo Courier Express
called attention to the jubilant “boasting” of the Scientific Institute of the German Labor Front that the number of Jews in Germany had been reduced by two-thirds since 1933. From a biological perspective, the Institute reported, “the Jewish population in Germany is ‘already dead' because only about 10 per cent of the men and 7 per cent of the women are of an age at which they can have children.” The
Courier Express
asked why the Institute report failed to indicate how much of the decrease in population was “due to emigration and how much to death by slow torture in Nazi concentration camps.” The paper denigrated those who branded news of Nazi atrocities as “propaganda,” because the most “imaginative of anti-Nazi propagandists” could not produce “indictments more damning than those which the Nazis have returned against themselves.” A similar Nazi indictment “against themselves” was offered in November 1941 when Hans Frank, governor of the
General gouvernement
, that part of the Polish interior in which most Jews were concentrated, told the press that “Jews [who] leave Polish ghettoes” would be shot.
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Using space allotment and page placement as measures of importance, it is clear that even though much of this news came either from German sources or from eyewitness accounts, its relative news value was not always considered high. While certain reports were prominently placed in the major dailies, often news of significant value was relegated to the depths of the paper. The
New York Times
carried the reports of “massive arrests” of Jews in Vichy in a twenty-six-line article on page 18 and the announcement that Jews over the age of six had to wear a star on page 14. The
New York Journal American
placed the announcement of German Jews' loss of all citizenship and residency rights and further confiscation of their property on page 30.
⁴⁶
The story of a Nazi edict which, in the words of the
New York Journal American
, “enslave[d] Jews” was on page 8 of that paper and on page 15 of the
New York World Telegram
.
⁴⁷
The
Chicago Tribune
placed the news that Jews were forbidden to use the telephone “even for [a] doctor” on the very bottom of page 10. News of an official decree that any Jews caught outside the ghetto which was the “sole living space alloted” to them would be summarily killed was carried on page 5 of the
Tribune
in a twelve-line story.
⁴⁸
The imposition of “rigid antisemitic laws” in Norway was reported by the
New York Journal American
on page 32. The death of 450 Dutch Jews in Mauthausen concentration camp appeared in the
Baltimore Sun
in a thirteen-line article at the bottom of page 10.
New York Times
editors placed a warning by twenty-six leaders of the Russian Jewish community that if Hitler was not defeated, “wholesale extermination would be the lot of all Jews” on page 5 at the bottom of the page. It ran Slovakia's decision to “oust” its Jewish people and send them to “concentration centers” on page 18 and Jewish leaders' predictions that Jews in Poland faced “extinction” as a result of ghetto conditions on page 28. The story of 200 Jewish suicides in Berlin in the wake of the imposition of laws regarding the wearing of the yellow star was on page 8 of the paper.
⁴⁹

Not all the reports were placed this deep inside the paper. Though they were rarely accorded space on page 1, a number appeared in fairly prominent positions. The
New York Herald Tribune
story on the “herding” of Russian Jews into ghettos was on page 3, as was the report of new restrictions on German Jews'
ability to earn a living. Economic restrictions on Vichy Jews and the promise of a “Jew-free Reich” by April 1, 1942; were on page 4 of the
Herald Tribune.
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One of the few times that a number of major dailies—including the
New York Journal American, New York Herald Tribune, St. Louis Post Dispatch
, and
San Francisco Chronicle
—found a story worthy of page 1 was in early November 1941 when the Reverend Bernard Lichtenberg, dean of St. Hedwig's Roman Catholic Cathedral in Berlin, was arrested for praying for the Jews. The
Boston Globe
devoted an editorial to Lichtenberg's “revolt.” Not all papers thought it so important. The
Chicago Tribune
placed it on page 16 and devoted only twenty-four lines to it.
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The attention paid to Lichtenberg by most of the major papers can, of course, be explained by the locale from which he voiced his protest: Berlin. But generally during these years, whenever the Pope or other leading Christian religious leaders spoke out on the Jews' behalf or decried the suffering of civilian populations, their comments garnered more attention than a similar story coming from a Jewish or, sometimes, even a government source. This attention may be attributed to the fact that a Christian was protesting what was being done to the Jews and also to the relative rarity of such protests by prominent Christian leaders. Sometimes even Christian protests could not penetrate editorial barriers. In 1944 the prominent publisher and newsman Oswald Garrison Villard complained about the way the
New York Times
handled a resolution passed by 500 Christian ministers and laymen denouncing the “systematic Nazi destruction of the Jewish people.” Villard said that

it was news and it was eminently fit to print but it was given only a few lines by the
Times
and buried inconspicuously on page seven. A similar happening [on another occasion] was carefully interred on page seventeen.

Villard attributed this to the paper's “unfortunate trait” of trying to avoid appearing as “a vigorous defender” of the Jews.
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*

By the end of October 1941 Louis Lochner was reporting that the total elimination of Jews from European life was “fixed German policy” and that Hitler's 1939 promise to render the Reich free of Jews was being realized. Nazi-like policies had been
instituted in Roumania, and several times a week transports “start eastward with Jews from the Rhineland and Westphalia, Berlin, Prague or Vienna.” The deportees' fate upon reaching the east was, Lochner observed with a note of real foreboding, unknown. That it would be extremely difficult was accepted without question.
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Relying on reports such as those dispatched by Lochner, the
Springfield News Sun
predicted that the Nazis have “ominous plans for them [the Jews] when the time comes.”
⁵⁴
A similar sense of foreboding—but not surprise—was evidenced by Frank Brutto of the Free Press News Service when he observed that “Nazi blueprints of the new order have no provision in them for the Jew except ghettos, exile, proscription. Adolf Hitler has more than said it. . . . Nearly everyday, somewhere, new action is taken against them.”
⁵⁵
That “ghettos, exile, proscription” awaited the Jews there was little question. The process of segregation was being carried out on a systematic basis. Antisemitism had, it was noted, “inevitably followed close behind the German armies.” No one disputed this conclusion. Early in November 1941 the Associated Press reported that the Jewish residents of Lvov had been ordered to move into a ghetto within the month.
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In late November reports of deportations were augmented with additional stories regarding massacres and tortures. The
New York Herald Tribune
chronicled the treatment of the Jews in occupied parts of Russia. Regarding the deportations it had no doubts: “According to reliable reports” which were subject to a “careful check,” 20,000 Jews had been “deported” to the Pinsk marshes. It quoted from a poignant letter sent by a Jewish woman in Vienna to her relatives immediately prior to her deportation: “everything is too late now. We bid you farewell, trusting that we shall see you again in the course of our life. Please take care of our children and tell them to accept things as they are.” But although by now the paper had received enough news to convince it that the reports of deportations and severe deprivation were reliable, when it came to discussing the massacres the
Herald Tribune
took a more restrained and skeptical stance. Using a reportorial style that would become virtually standard for stories on the mass murder of Jews, the paper distanced itself from the information and became the neutral transmitter. In the final paragraph of the news story it added, almost as an afterthought, that “some reports received here from Central Europe
speak
of massacres of Jews by Germans in the occupied part of Russia.” The number of Jews killed in
Kiev
“has been put
as high as 52,000.”
⁵⁷
Apparently, the news of massacres was open to question, though the reports of brutality and slave labor were not, even though they came from similar sources.