Beyond Belief (42 page)

Journalists who had been stationed in Germany were among those most distressed by the American refusal to believe that the Germans were engaging in physical persecution. In March 1943 William Shirer, writing in the
Washington Post
, castigated the public for thinking that the stories of the atrocities were untrue or had been magnified for “propaganda purposes.” He attributed this attitude to a “silly sort of supercynicism and superskepticism” which persisted despite the fact that there was “no earthly reason” for people not to believe. These doubts were not, of course, a new phenomenon. When Shirer was a reporter in Berlin, “most of the Americans who visited Germany in the early Nazi days used to say: ‘The Nazis can't really be as bad as you correspondents paint them.' ” Shirer found the persistence of disbelief particularly inexplicable in light of the fact that the Nazis had themselves admitted the truth of some of the atrocities and that many others had been committed in public view.
²

In April 1943 Dorothy Thompson, in her column “On the Record,” decried the American conviction that atrocity stories were either “merely propaganda” or “greatly exaggerated.”
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In January 1944 Arthur Koestler also expressed his frustration that so many people refused to believe that the “grim stories of Nazi atrocities are true.” Writing in the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
, Koestler cited public opinion polls in the United States in which nine out of ten average Americans dismissed the accusations against the Nazis as propaganda lies and flatly stated that they did not believe a word of them. How, he wondered, could Americans be convinced that this “nightmare” was reality?
The Christian Century
responded to Koestler by arguing that there really was no point in “screaming” about the atrocities against the Jews because this would only “emotionally exhaust” those who wanted to devote their energies
“after”
the war to “building peace.” In another one of the magazine's long line of disparaging comments about the Jewish community, the article castigated “people who claim to be more aroused about this mass killing of Jews in Europe than the rest of us, . . . [and who] seem to want more committees.” Koestler, the journal graciously acknowledged, was “too honest a person” to be among those who were the “screamers.”
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Even members of the armed forces vigorously dismissed the accounts of horror.
Saturday Evening Post
editor Edgar Snow related how an American flyer who had just returned from bombing the German lines emphatically stated that “he didn't believe all that ‘propaganda' about Nazi brutality.” This soldier, who was typical of many of his colleagues, was convinced that it was “probably all lies” designed to convince Americans of the enemy's nefarious ways. Moreover, soldiers argued, there was no real difference between Axis and Allied forces. “They say they are fighting for an ideal and they are ready to die for it, and that's just what we're doing.” A newspaperman who was serving in the armed forces wrote that the “boys” in uniform got “vastly more indignant about gasoline rationing than they do about the slaughter of civilians.” Koestler, who had been lecturing to the troops since 1941, also found that the men in uniform didn't believe in “the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec. You can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defense begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex.”
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This confusion regarding what was going on in Europe did not really dissipate with either the passage of time or the release of more information. In October 1944 Averell Harriman, American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, felt compelled to reassure the press that the reports of massacres and atrocities committed by the Germans and their supporters in Russian territory “have not been and cannot be exaggerated.” Though a December 1944 Gallup poll revealed that 76 percent of those queried now believed that many people had been “murdered” in concentration camps, the estimates they gave of the number who had died indicated that they had not really grasped the scope of the tragedy. Furthermore, while more Americans were now willing to believe that many people had been killed, they generally did not believe in the existence of gas chambers and death camps.
⁶

By the final weeks of the war increasing numbers of reporters and columnists were complaining about the public's unshakable doubts. In April 1945
Washington Post
correspondent Edward Folliard observed that on the basis of his experiences with American forces, “where atrocities are concerned most Americans are skeptics . . . they have to be shown” to believe and most of them had apparently not yet seen enough.
⁷
Syndicated columnist Marquis Childs criticized Americans who “put down to ‘propaganda'
the latest reports of murder factories.”
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Paul Winkler described his frustration in trying to convey to the “ever-skeptical masses” the proof of “Teutonic bestiality.” Henry J. Taylor of the
New York World Telegram
and the Scripps-Howard newspapers, declared it “incredible that there should be any doubt at home about the truth of the Nazis' wholesale atrocities,” but there were. Taylor observed that “in the last war only a few of the German atrocity stories were true, yet most of them were believed. In this war the atrocity stories are true yet few seem to be believed.”
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But doubts still persisted even at the very end of the war after American soldiers, reporters, editors, publishers, and members of Congress had seen camps and after the Army Signal Corps screened a movie on the atrocities in American theaters. In May 1945, upon his return from visiting the camps, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher and editor of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, wrote “A Report to the American People,” in which he described Buchenwald and Dachau. He began this lengthy article by expressing his dismay at finding that there were still Americans who were saying, “this talk of atrocities is all propaganda.” On May 5, 1945,
Editor & Publisher
recommended that all newspapers devote as much space as possible to pictures of Nazi atrocities. The magazine acknowledged that “for years all Americans” had found it difficult to believe the atrocity stories. But even after these stories had been verified by war correspondents, some Americans had “built up such immunity to what they call propaganda that they still refuse to believe it.” Some of the soldiers who participated in the liberation of the camps took pictures of what they saw. When they returned to the United States, they found that people were impressed by the fact that the photographs were not “official” pictures taken by the Army Signal Corps, but were photos by an “amateur photographer in which there could be no doctoring of scenes and no faking of film.” Other soldiers returned to find that even their own pictures did not convince people. “They said it's propaganda.” One G.I. who was at Dachau told his parents what he saw “and they didn't know what the hell I was talkin' about.” From that point on, he “rarely mentioned” his experience.
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There were critics who argued that the reports, photographs, and films detailing what had been found in the camps were being released in order to implant in the American public a feeling of vengeance. James Agee, writing in
The Nation
of May 19, 1945,
attacked the films even though he had not seen them—he did not believe “it necessary” to do so. “Such propaganda”—even if true—was designed to make Americans equate all Germans with the few who perpetrated these crimes. Milton Mayer, in an article in
The Progressive
, went a step further than Agee. He not only argued against vengeance but questioned whether the films and reports could really be true. “There are to be sure fantastic discrepancies in the reports.”
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This attitude was not unique to America. The English public was also difficult to convince. In the April 28, 1945, edition of the
New Statesman and Nation
an article decried the people “who don't believe, don't
even now
believe and say that this is merely a newspaper stunt, or is government propaganda.” In mid-April 1945 BBC officials, well aware of listeners' inclination to dismiss any reports of atrocities as “propaganda,” broadcast Edward R. Murrow's famous depiction of Buchenwald rather than that of their own BBC reporter. They did so because they believed that the British public, which held Murrow in high esteem, would not reject information broadcast by him as government-inspired atrocity tales.
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Though a number of columnists and reporters complained about these doubts as the war neared its end, the fact is that the press bears a great measure of responsibility for the public's skepticism and ignorance of the scope of the wartime tragedy. The public's doubts were strengthened and possibly even created by the manner in which the media told the story. If the press did not help plant the seeds of doubt in readers' minds, it did little to eradicate them. In the pages that follow we shall examine how, as the war neared its end, editors and reporters tried to explain their treatment of the news.

During the war journalists frequently said that the news of deportations and executions did not come from eyewitnesses who could personally confirm what had happened and therefore, as journalists, they were obliged to treat it skeptically. This explanation is faulty because much of the information came from German statements, broadcasts, and newspapers. If anything, these sources would have been inclined to deny, not verify, the news.
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Neutral
sources also affirmed the reliability of the reports. Moreover, even when the press did encounter witnesses, it often dismissed what they had to say because they were not considered “reliable” or “impartial.”

The victims themselves recognized the difficulty they faced in piercing the barriers of incredulity. A Polish underground courier who, in August 1944, reached London with news of the stepped-up pace of the slaughter of Hungarian Jews was shocked to find that despite the fact that he brought news from within Auschwitz itself, “nobody will believe.” As late as 1944 eyewitness accounts—particularly those of victims—were not considered irrefutable evidence even if they came from independent sources and corroborated one another. The press often categorized them as prejudiced or exaggerated. At the end of the war Kenneth McCaleb, war editor of the
New York Daily Mirror
, admitted that whenever he had read about German atrocities, he had not taken them seriously because they had always come from “ ‘foreigners' who, many of us felt, had some ax to grind and must be exaggerat[ing].”
¹⁴

Given this prejudicial feeling about witnesses, one would have expected that visits by journalists themselves to the massacre sites would have dissipated these doubts. But when the barriers to belief were strong enough, even a face-to-face encounter with the remains of a Nazi atrocity did not suffice to dispel doubts, as an incident in the fall of 1943 demonstrated. In October 1943, as German forces were beginning to retreat from Russian territory, Soviet officials brought a group of foreign reporters to Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev in which the Nazis had killed thousands of Jews. The Russians told the reporters that the Germans had massacred between 50,000 and 80,000 Kiev Jews in September 1941 and the total number of Jews of Kiev who had been killed might climb to over 100,000.

By this point the Nazi threat to “exterminate” the Jews should have been understood as a literal one. There was little reason, in light of the abundance of evidence, to deny that multitudes were being murdered as part of a planned program of annihilation. But despite all the detail there was a feeling among some correspondents,
New York Times
reporter Bill Lawrence most prominent among them, that the reports that Hitler and his followers had conducted a systematic extermination campaign were untrue. Lawrence did not doubt that Hitler had “treated the Jews badly, forcing
many of them to flee to the sanctuaries of the West”; but even in October 1943—ten months after the Allied declaration confirming the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and six months after Bermuda—he could not believe that the Nazis had murdered “millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies. . . . and those who might be mentally retarded.”
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His skepticism permeated his story on Babi Yar. Though he acknowledged that there were no more Jews in Kiev, their whereabouts he simply dismissed as a “mystery.” Lawrence's report surely left even the least skeptical reader unconvinced of the Babi Yar slayings.

On the basis of what we saw, it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity of the story told to us. It is the
contention
of the authorities in Kiev that the Germans, with characteristic thoroughness, not only burned the bodies and clothing, but also crumbled the bones, and shot and burned the bodies of all prisoners of war participating in the burning, except for a handful that escaped.
¹⁶

Equally skeptical about the reports of mass murder was Jerome Davis of Hearst's International News Service and the
Toronto Star
. Neither Lawrence nor Davis seemed able to accept the idea of a massacre, much less of a Final Solution.

Davis's and Lawrence's doubts would have been more understandable had their colleagues who visited the site with them manifested the same suspicions. But they drew markedly different conclusions. Bill Downs, who was Moscow correspondent for CBS and
Newsweek
, was convinced that one of the “most horrible tragedies in this Nazi era of atrocities occurred there.” Henry Shapiro of United Press, Maurice Hindus, a special correspondent for the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, and Paul Winterton of the BBC all described the flesh, human bones, hair, shoes, glass cases, and even gold bridgework they found in the dirt. Lawrence and Davis, who saw the same things the other reporters found, could not believe that they represented the remains of thousands. Though neither Lawrence nor Davis suggested it, it was obvious that they both believed that these items could have been placed in the sand by those who wished the reporters to believe that such things had happened there.
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