Beyond Belief (36 page)

In addition to these calls for action, the conference also had to contend with a deep-seated skepticism. Freda Kirchwey, publisher of
The Nation
and an outspoken critic of the State Department's rescue policy, deprecated the “modest step” of a conference even before it began and reminded readers that this meeting was not called “because our government felt impelled to do something about the greatest crime committed in our generation,” but because of the public pressure as exemplified by the March rallies. Nonetheless, she urged, “let's have the conference,” and let the “restrained and practical” proposals adopted at the Madison Square Garden rally on March 1 serve as guidelines.
²⁸

Washington and London, well aware of both the high expectations and the skepticism, did not want to risk exacerbating the
very situation that Bermuda had been designed to resolve. In the days prior to the opening of the meeting, whenever officials met with reporters they repeatedly stressed certain themes which then appeared in all the news stories about the meeting: Bermuda was a first step, it was exploratory, and therefore not much should be expected from it; there were tremendous problems which made previctory rescue virtually impossible despite the Allies' best intentions; and—lest they be accused of shirking their responsibility—America and Britain had already done a great deal for the refugee victims of Nazi Germany. On the eve of the meeting an unnamed “high authority” told the press that a total of 600,000 European political refugees had been “permitted to enter the United States since Hitler came to power ten years ago.” Kingsbury Smith, INS correspondent in Washington, observed that this was “one of the main reasons why further mass movements of European refugees to this country in the near future will be opposed” at Bermuda.
²⁹
An AP dispatch on the conference observed that the United States, which was “beginning to feel the pinch of wartime shortages, is sheltering more than 500,000 refugees” from German controlled countries.
³⁰
The message was clear: the problem was great but the United States had done its share and more. The British stressed the same theme. Richard Law told the press that “it would be extremely difficult to find any place in the British Empire for victims of Axis persecution.” Again and again readers were told that refugee aid was “linked to victory in war” and therefore substantial relief was “not possible now.”
³¹

The prominent journalist Raymond Clapper reiterated the official line regarding the conference and described it as “largely an exploratory affair” from which few concrete decisions could be expected. At best it might recommend a program for “future consideration.” He even echoed what we now know were some American and British officials' deepest fears: that Germany would decide not to kill multitudes of Jews, but to release them. In 1943 British officials expressed their fears to the State Department that Germany might “change over from a policy of extermination to one of extrusion and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.” In 1944 both British and American officials worried that “Germans might play the card of offering an unmanageable number of refugees to the United Nations.” Clapper expressed this same concern. If Germany were to offer to free refugees, this would, he argued,
have to be turned down because “no move of that kind [would be made] from humanitarian motives, but only for military reasons that would benefit Germany.” This would be a way for Germany to unload its “excess population on the Allies.”
³²

E. Berg Holt, the
Christian Science Monitor's
special correspondent in London, also expressed these fears that Germany might actually free some Jews.

Supposing the Axis were to allow them to be transported to the Coast, how would the United Nations find ships to take them away? Where would they take them? How would they feed them?

Since the Allies could neither move nor care for this “excess population,” such an offer by the Axis would have to be rejected.
³³
When British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was in Washington in March 1943 right before Bermuda, Secretary of State Hull raised the issue of rescuing the 60,000 to 70,000 Jews in Bulgaria who were threatened with death unless they could be rescued quickly. Eden responded, according to Harry Hopkins's summary of the meeting, that the Allies should be very cautious about acting.

If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.
³⁴

Because Bermuda was a military controlled area, access to the island was extremely difficult. Even if the proponents of various rescue proposals had been able to get to Bermuda, they would not have been allowed to present their ideas to the delegates. This was not fortuitous, but had been carefully planned by the organizers. Breckinridge Long, who was in charge of the arrangements for the American delegation, was particularly adamant on this point. He refused a last-minute British request that representatives of the English Jewish community be allowed to attend. No one who might raise embarrassing questions or stymie the public relations goals of the conference was to be present. When Jewish and non-Jewish groups criticized this decision, the State Department denied that Bermuda was being held, in the words of CIO President Phillip Murray, “behind closed doors.”
³⁵
But the Department's denials could not alter the fact that the doors
were
closed—the meeting was on an island in a military area into
which entry was completely controlled—and with good reason. Officials correctly feared that if the true nature of the proceedings was known, the criticism would be even more severe.

Surprisingly few papers were critical about being barred. No groups or individuals—other than the delegates—could monitor the proceedings, and the officials and experts accompanying the delegation were absolutely forbidden to talk to the press, but most reporters and editorial boards did not question these limiting conditions. In contrast, the press as a whole was vehemently critical of the efforts made to bar it from covering the United Nations Food Conference at Hot Springs, Arkansas, convened by Roosevelt and to be held shortly after Bermuda. Typical was Raymond Moley of the
Chicago Journal of Commerce
syndicate, who devoted two columns to the Hot Springs meeting. He argued that “access by the press to public officials” was a right.
³⁶
The president of the American Association of Newspaper Editors decried the limits that were to be placed on the press at the food gathering as a “dangerous precedent.” The
New York Times
discussed the controversy on its front page, and the Senate held an “extraordinary” closed session of the Foreign Relations and Agriculture committees to discuss the grievances of protesting journalists.
³⁷
Because of journalists' protests Hot Springs was eventually opened to the press.

Few journalists had any protests about the arrangements at Bermuda because while their access to delegates and substantive information was extremely limited, they were not
totally
barred from Bermuda. One columnist who did complain was the
Christian Science Monitor's
Roscoe Drummond. He wrote that the reason Bermuda had been chosen was that it was

nicely secluded from the press and radio . . . in a theater of war . . . . The lack of transportation means that the Administration has only to crook its finger in the direction of the War Department to prevent all correspondents from going to Bermuda.

In contrast to Drummond's complaint, Raymond Clapper praised the conveners of Bermuda for
not
attempting to implement secrecy arrangements. He visited Bermuda right before the conference began and dismissed the charge being voiced by Jewish groups and the liberal press that it was being held at an “isolated island” as invalid. He then described the half-hour horse-and-buggy ride
necessary for any member of the press corps to reach the meeting site! He also claimed that the delegates were accessible to the press. Clapper's views were diametrically opposed to Congressman Emanuel Celler's contention that Bermuda was being held under “hermetically sealed” conditions, or a
Christian Science Monitor
staff correspondent's comments during the conference that the delegates were “exceptionally guarded in [their] occasional statements to the press.” At the conference's end the same correspondent noted that reporters had only been allowed to interview delegates on “rare occasions and most of what they said was ‘off the record.' . . . In no sense was the press encouraged” in its attempts to cover this gathering. But these complaints about the conference's inaccessibility were the exception to the rule.
³⁸

Every time officials met with the press they elaborated on the tremendous problems facing them. The tenor of press comment throughout Bermuda reflected this. Headlines referred to “hurdles” and “problems” faced by the conferees. Anyone who read the wire service reports from Bermuda would have learned virtually nothing about what could be done and much about why the refugee problem was “insoluble at present.” While even Bermuda's critics would not have taken issue with the contention that “winning the war [was] more essential than any other action for relief of oppressed peoples,” they argued that there were certain things that could be done even while the war was underway.
³⁹
Some of the proposals which were either not considered at Bermuda or hastily rejected as not feasible included sending food to the victims; using neutral Portuguese and Spanish ships or empty American ships which had deposited men or material in Europe to transport Jews to a safe haven—including America; increasing the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States; changing Britain's Palestine policy so that Jewish refugees could enter; and negotiating with satellite Axis countries regarding release of their Jews. Since it was becoming increasingly clear that the Allies would win the war, many people believed that the Axis satellites would have been anxious to win favor with the Allies and might have considered releasing Jews as a means of doing so.

One of the major “hurdles” facing those who wanted Bermuda to accomplish something concrete was that there still was a deep-seated anti-immigration feeling in this country. While Bermuda was in session,
Editorial Research Reports
predicted that it was
“doubtful” whether Congress could be convinced “to make any sweeping change in immigration statutes to admit large numbers of European refugees.” At the last minute Congress had added an addendum to a bill to permit the “importation of aliens for agricultural work.” The addendum, which stipulated that these aliens had to be “‘native-born residents' of North, South or Central America, or adjacent islands,” was added, it was explained on the floor, in order to bar the entry of “European refugees in the guise of farm laborers.”
⁴⁰

Even by the time the conference opened, the press was already ambivalent about how important this gathering was. While the
New York Times, New York Herald Tribune
, and
Christian Science Monitor
carried the story on the front page, the
San Francisco Chronicle
placed it on page 6, the
New York Journal American
on page 4, the
Chicago Tribune
on page 8, the
San Francisco Examiner
on page 10, and the
Los Angeles Times
on page 11.
⁴¹

On the same day that the delegates began their deliberations, the Inter-Allied Information Committee in London released a report replete with what Eric Hawkins,
New York Herald Tribune
bureau member, described as “sickening details of torture, massacre and butchery carried out by the Germans.” According to the report, one-eighth of the Jewish people had been killed and 5 million faced the peril of death. The article, which was on the front page of the
New York Herald Tribune
along with the AP dispatch on Bermuda, bore a bold five-line headline:

REPORT TELLS OF NAZI ANNIHILATION
OF 2,0
00,000 JEWS IN E
UROPE

Inter-Allied Committee, in Passover Document,
Tells of Butchery of Eighth of Jewish Peoples
and Peril of Death Facing 5,000,000 More

In contrast, the
New York Times
devoted twenty-three lines to the report, which it placed on page 11 as an addendum to the Bermuda story. The
New York Journal American
devoted twenty-five lines on page 4.
⁴²
Most other papers simply ignored the report.

After the opening day most of the reports on Bermuda in the major dailies were but a few paragraphs long and were to be found in fairly out-of-the-way corners of the paper. Reporters had little to tell except that the conferees faced “great limitations” in the action they could take, that any substantial programs or
“large scale rescue” was “out of the question,” and that solutions were “unlikely.” Delegates claimed that progress had been made, though what that progress was remained a mystery. While Alexander Uhl of the liberal daily
PM
dismissed the official claims that the meeting was “getting to the heart of the problem,” other papers, including the
St. Louis Post Dispatch, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle
, and even the
New York Times
, believed progress was being made.
⁴³
On April 22 the
Monitor
carried a picture of the delegates entitled “Envoys of Hope” and this headline: