Beyond Belief (30 page)

NAZIS' EXECUTIONS PUT AT 97 IN WEEK

Eight days later the following headline appeared on page 4:

18 MORE CZ
ECHS EXECUTE
D BY NAZIS

Charged with Link to Attack on Heydrich,
Who I
s Said to Approac
h Crisis

Total Slain is Now 81

Two Families at Bruenn Are Reported Among the
44 Persons Killed Saturday
²¹

When the paper printed the story on the BBC broadcast concerning the death of 700,000 Jews, it ran it at the end of a series of other short stories concerning Nazi atrocities. Among the stories which
preceded
the BBC report was the news of the shooting of five Poles for striking Germans and the slaying of 800 Czechs in punishment for the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich's murder. The figure of 800 is exceptional: rarely did these stories deal with more than a hundred deaths; often the toll was far less. Nonetheless they were accorded more space and prominence than much larger death tolls. It is possible that the
New York Times
believed the death of non-Jewish civilians, particularly in reprisal for “anti-Nazi” behavior, to be something new and different and therefore especially worthy of readers' attention, whereas the death of Jews was no longer a novel event.

There is yet another explanation which must be considered in the case of the
New York Times
. The paper, particularly during the period of the 1930s and 1940s, was anxious not to appear “too Jewish.” As Gay Talese, who once worked for the paper, observed, “the
New York Times
does not wish to be thought of as a Jewish newspaper' . . . and [therefore] it will bend over backwards to prove this . . . forcing itself at times into unnatural positions, contorted by compromise.” David Halberstam, in
The Powers That Be
, offers a similar analysis of the paper's behavior regarding Jews.
*

The
New York Times
was—and in many quarters still is—considered America's “newspaper of record,” and in a poll taken during the period, accredited Washington correspondents by a vote of more than five to one judged it to be the nation's most reliable, comprehensive, and fair paper. Had the
Times
reacted with less equanimity, it is possible that other American papers would have followed suit.
²³

There is also another explanation for the attention the
New York Times
, as well as some other papers, paid to the reports of the reprisal killing of non-Jews: source credibility in editors' eyes. The information regarding such killings generally came from official German sources. In mid-June 1942 the Germans announced that they had killed 480 civilians in Lidice, in reprisal for the murder of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. In a front-page story the
New York Times
described the Germans as having “blot[ted] out” the Bohemian village. This, the
New York Herald Tribune
observed, was not the product of the

terrified imagination of a refugee or [the] invention of an angry propagandist. It is the official announcement of the Nazi radio. A foolish German emperor, in an oratorical indiscretion, once told his soldiers to act like Huns. This is the formal statement of a government that it has actually done so.
²⁴

A similar judgment about source credibility may have been
what led the
Chicago Tribune
to allot a front-page banner headline to the murder of 258 Jews by the SS but to relegate the news of the death of 1 million to eleven lines in the bottom half of page 6. The front-page headline, which stretched across most of the upper half of the page, read:

HITLER GUARDS STAGE NEW POGROM; KILL 258;

MASSACRED BY BERLIN GESTAPO IN ‘BOMB PLOT';

Families Herded for Deportation.

Although the story was not the formal statement of a government, it came from “various trustworthy sources” in Berlin who had access to officials in the SS and the Propaganda Ministry. Two days later the
Chicago Daily Tribune
devoted nine lines on the lower half of page 6 to the report by the Federation of Jewish Relief Organizations that 25,000 Latvian Jews had been slain during the German invasion the previous summer.
This
news came not from the perpetrators or other “trustworthy” sources, but from the victims. Consequently it was less credible. The
New York Times
also ran the story of the execution of the 258 on page 1. Two days later it placed the report of the massacre of thousands in Vilna on page 6. It put the story of the BBC report on the death of 700,000 Jews on page 5 at the end of a string of other short articles concerning a variety of war matters.
²⁵

In addition to its being the word of the perpetrators, there is yet another explanation for why news released by the Germans was treated as more credible than news released by the Jews or by the Polish government in exile. The number of victims, while not small, was entirely within the realm of “reason.” In contrast, the tolls given by Polish and Jewish organizations could be dismissed as too immense to be plausible. A million was a hard number to fathom, particularly a million victims not killed in the line of duty, but slaughtered in cold blood. A toll of 258 or even 800, while certainly tragic, was within most people's grasp. These were numbers with which they were conversant. Ironically, the larger the proportions of the tragedy, the less believable the story became.

Incidentally, in the case of the story of the 258, the accusations of the perpetrators were greeted with skepticism.
New York Times
reporter George Axelson, who cabled this story from Stockholm, did not doubt that 258 Jews “were put to death by the S.S.”
However, he questioned the Nazi claim that the victims had planted bombs on the premises of an anti-Bolshevist exhibit because it seemed impossible that Jews who had to wear “the conspicuous Star of David on their clothing and are ruled off
Unter den Linden
and streets of central Berlin generally” could have obtained the bombs and then successfully placed them in the exhibit. Despite the Gestapo's claims to have “unquestionable proof,” Axelson was skeptical, particularly because the five bombs were discovered prior to being detonated.
²⁶

The pattern of subdued, almost repressed treatment of much of the news of the Final Solution continued even as the pace and scope of the news increased. At the end of July, news of the plans to wipe out the Warsaw ghetto reached the west. In light of the previous reports of mass murder there was good reason to believe that the 600,000 Jews in Warsaw were about to face a fate similar to what had befallen the Jews of Vilna, Lvov, Latvia, eastern Galicia, and other parts of Poland and Russia. In the
New York Times
a UP release carried the following headline:

YUGOSLAVS DRIVING

AXIS FROM BOSNIA

Guerrillas Rout Italians and

Cause State of Siege in

Zagreb, London Hears

New Warsaw Curbs Due

Nazis Said to Plan Wiping Out
of 600,000 in Ghetto—17
Condemned in Bulgaria

Not only did readers have to reach the final section of this rather lengthy headline to find reference to the news of the fate which awaited the inhabitants of the ghetto, but they had to read through to the 79th line of a 121-line story to learn that the “Nazi authorities in Poland are planning to ‘exterminate' the entire Warsaw ghetto whose population is estimated at 600,000 Jews.” Although the report of the “despair and suicides [which] had swept the Warsaw ghetto” when the new deportations from the ghetto began was attributed to “reliable reports from the Continent,” it was placed on page 7 as part of an array of other stories regarding the war. The page placement and the juxtaposition of the threat
to 600,000 with the condemnation of 17 seemed to reflect this continued ambivalence about both the importance and the reliability of the news.
²⁷

The
Toronto Globe
adopted a markedly different approach. It ran the story on the Warsaw ghetto as a separate news story with the following headline:

GESTAPO PLANS TO EXTERMINATE ALL JEWS IN WARSAW GHETTO

According to Polish spokesmen quoted in the article, “two train loads of Jews have departed toward their doom without anything further being heard from them.”
²⁸
Newsweek
, which ignored the Polish government in exile announcement but ran the story on the deportations from the ghetto, followed suit. According to the magazine Jews were now being taken from the Warsaw ghetto and relocated “600 miles farther east.” Instead of speculating about what “relocation” might really mean, it simply noted that “two trainloads of Jews had already vanished into black Limbo.”
²⁹
The British-based news agency Reuters was far more explicit regarding the “passengers” destination. “Two trainloads have left. It is feared that when they arrive they will be murdered.” Then, as if to further validate these fears, the Reuters dispatch went on to state that “near Lodzimieres in Eastern Poland there is a common grave, a mile long, of thousands of massacred Jews.”
³⁰

Over the course of July and August additional such stories appeared in the press. Most of the major American dailies handled them in a similar way, showing remarkable restraint, given the nature of the news. It was almost never on the front page. Commonly found on pages 3 through 10, often it was allotted a few lines, and rarely was it given a bold headline. On July 26, a month after the announcement by the Polish government in exile that “deportation” to the east meant death for Jews, the
Chicago Tribune
reported that the Nazis would shortly begin deporting all Dutch Jews between the ages of eighteen and forty. This story ran on page 9. In late July the Polish government in exile released details concerning the execution of 200,000 Jews and a quarter of a million Poles. The
New York World Telegram
story on the announcement omitted mention of Jews as victims and was placed on page 22 next to an article about a doctor who hypnotized himself into
making a parachute jump. The two articles were accorded exactly the same amount of space.
³¹

Sometimes the press was so restrained that it simply ignored the Jews' fate. A
Los Angeles Times
editorial in August discussed the condition of the civilian population in occupied countries. It cited UP estimates that the total number of civilian victims was 400,000 and the number of “hostages” in the millions. No mention was made of the Jews and what was happening to them. Even when it reported on the “Stop Hitler” rallies held in several United States cities during the summer, much of the press ignored the fact that they were, in the words of the organizers, a protest against the “extermination of Jews . . . . [by] forced labor, in concentration camps or as victims of experiment in poison gas factories.” Instead the rallies were described in nonspecific terms, e.g., as “rallies to protest against the barbaric treatment that is the lot of oppressed people in Nazi occupied countries.” Often no mention was made of Jews, gas chambers, or a program for mass murder. The
New York Herald Tribune
covered the New York rally in a way that almost totally obscured its objective. It virtually ignored that the rally had been called because of events in Europe. Both the headline and the article focused on the fact that Governor Lehman was “hissed” when he spoke out against a separate Jewish army.
*
CBS, NBC, and Mutual radio broadcasts failed to cover the gatherings.
³²

Given the press ambivalence about the news, it is not surprising that there was little discussion of whether anything might be done to prevent further deaths. But during this particular period serious discussion of rescue had to face another obstacle as well. There was a common perception that the Allies were “not winning the war.” Editorials, news stories, and columns bemoaned the dire military situation. The
Christian Science Monitor
complained that it was so precarious that Allied officials were “withholding bad news.” Walter Lippmann decried the “cult of incompetence” that characterized Allied war efforts. The gravity of the situation was reinforced by setbacks in Russia, North Africa, and the Pacific. News of deportations from France and massacres and the death
of multitudes in Eastern Europe had to compete with headlines proclaiming

NAZIS SMASH AT MOSCOW

Russ Retreat All Along Line

The Germans were pushing toward the Caucusus; Stalingrad was on the verge of collapse. The German advance into Russia seemed unstoppable. Western Europe was firmly in Nazi control. The North African coast was in German hands. The Japanese were winning key Pacific battles. American military installations at Guadalcanal were under heavy bombardment. In late September a
Los Angeles Times
front-page headline proclaimed

WAR DECLARED BEING LOST
³³

Even those optimists who believed victory would come eventually had to acknowledge that a long pitched battle lay ahead.
³⁴
Anyone who might have argued for rescue of Jews found the moral imperative of the argument significantly vitiated by the military situation. Thus those who could not or did not want to believe discounted the news as implausible, while those who believed and wanted concerted rescue efforts could not demand them when the military prognosis seemed so bleak.

As we have seen, ever since the Nazis had begun to persecute Jews, the American press had felt compelled to offer rational explanations of the events to its readers. It continued to do so even as the news of massacres and deportations reached the west. This inclination to find a rational explanation was so compelling that at times the press accepted information released by the Nazis—designed to camouflage the Final Solution—at face value. Deportations, the Nazis announced and the press reported, were necessary in order to provide homes for “bombed out Aryans.” The denial of the right of Jews to emigrate was explained by Nazis and the press as due to the Reich's labor shortage.
³⁵
On certain occasions when the Nazis made their intentions clear, the press refused to accept the implications of what was being said because it seemed too fantastic to believe. When Goebbels announced that the “Jews had started the war” and would “pay for every
dead soldier,” the
Chicago Tribune
responded by explaining that the deportations and persecution were “nothing but” a means of giving Germans who had lost fathers and sons in Russia and were “facing the privations of another war winter the spectacle of a few unfortunate people whose sufferings make their own seem bearable by comparison.”
³⁶
The
Springfield
(Ohio)
News Sun
also believed that the persecution of the Jews was a diversion aimed at keeping